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Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice

Volume 4(1), 2012, pp. , ISSN 1948-9137

CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE AND ITS APPLICATION TO

ENTREPRENEURIAL OPPORTUNITY AND ETHICS

MURRAY HUNTER

murray@unimap.edu.my

Centre for Communication & Entrepreneurship

University Malaysia Perlis

ABSTRACT. This paper begins with a review of major issues facing society today,

observing how difficult they are to solve. After a review of the nature of the

environment, introducing the concepts of relatedness and influence of time and

space on innovation, thinking, cognition, intelligence, and creativity, the metaphoric

concept of creative intelligence is postulated. The elements of creative intelligence

are described along with other supporting elements like prior knowledge,

imagination, energy, and awareness. The role of creative intelligence in developing

entrepreneurial opportunities and solving ethical problems is then discussed.

Keywords: Environment, relatedness, cognition, imagination, energy, intelligence,

creativity, creative intelligence, awareness, entrepreneurial opportunity, ethics.

“Hard imaginative thinking has not increased so as to keep pace with

the expansion and complications of human societies and organizations”

H.G. Wells1

1. Introduction

On the face of current events one could be excused for thinking that we are

facing a crisis in creativity and original thinking.2 The absence of derived

new meanings from the environment is leading to a vacuum in the

emergence of new philosophies. Generation Y appears to be on a sojourn of

self discovery for meaning. Technology has created a dual economy made

up of exploited unskilled assembly workers on one side and wealthy

consumers on the other. The North-South divide is as wide as ever. We are

not sure whether the economic downturns of late are a cyclic phenomena or

whether there is something structurally wrong with the system itself. Many

decisions institutions within society has made achieved counterintuitive

10

results, where the opposite to what was desired has occurred, i.e., the

restriction of narcotics and enforcement has produced a large underground

industry with a high cost of enforcement. There are so many potential crises

in the world today without apparent solutions (see table 1.), highlighting a

great discrepancy between these issues and our ability to solve them.

Some are calling upon our past growth paradigms to be re-evaluated due

to growing resource scarcity, our damaging effect upon the environment,

and the inability of the economic system to make reallocation adjustments

to account for rapid depletion of hydrocarbon resources.3 As we move from

elite to mass education, students primarily attend universities as a means to

gain a more lucrative career, rather than intellectual enrichment4, Our level

of knowledge is doubling every five years, yet our understanding about the

workings, interrelationships and co-dependence within the environment is

still apparently lacking.

We think in predictable ways5 rationalized in one dimensionality

6,

where idea originality is scarce. Problems that don’t fit into our socio-

political worldview are downplayed, ignored, or even abnegated existence

because of our prevailing biases, vested interests and/or the fear of moving

to new viewpoints and positions. Most often, politically embedded national

agendas prescribe our solutions without giving the opportunity to reflect or

develop new insights. For example, nationalist sentiment, strict border

control, and immigration laws hinder the redistribution of labor migration

from areas where there are acute levels of poverty and unemployment to

areas where there are chronic labor shortages. Positive thinking has become

a form of social control, where dissent is brushed aside and labeled as

pessimism. Our optimistic outlook to the affairs of the world is a delusion of

willful ignorance, reducing our vigilance, and contributing to the creation of

a blind and powerless society.7 Future solutions will depend upon the

ability of humans to escape this moral callousness and think creatively

outside our existing patterning, and predisposed paradigms of thought.

2. Domains, Reductionism and Paths

In the Victorian era scientists began to divide fields into narrow and

protected domains with their own vocabularies, hierarchies, and elites; thus

cementing tightly bounded beliefs into respective disciplines. The

predominating metaphor of these disciplines has been that of the machine,

clockwork, precision, and predictability, reflected in the precision of

mathematics and quantitative theories. The goal of science was to reduce

the world into understandable parts in order to reduce our sense of

uncertainty and anxiousness. The development of these academic domains

where expert specialization takes place has led to little increased creativity

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and original thinking. In fact specialization has seemed to hinder

innovation.8

Many massive engineering developments like the building of the

Hoover Dam, the development of the atomic bomb, and the space program

were not based on science as much as they have been based upon

engineering reductionism.9 Potential new breakthroughs in specific

domains are often resisted by discipline centered experts committed to

established reductionist views based on the models they work from. Some

discipline premises were totally incorrect. For example, economics

preached individualism and decentralized markets, yet our security and

prosperity has been largely the result of collective action to eradicate

disease, promote science, develop critical infrastructure and, provide

widespread education.10

The tools of trade are usually too selective to allow

the big picture to be seen, becoming the ‘rose colored glasses’ of perceptual

and discipline-centric domain imprisonment.11

This can be very clearly seen in the parable of a king who invited a

group of blind men to identify an elephant shows that our understanding is

based on perspective. One feels the tail and says it is a rope. Another grabs

the leg and says it is a pillar. Another feels the side and says it’s a wall.

Another felt the head and said it was a water jug, and so on.

Real science and the development of new knowledge are based on

simple experiments to test hypotheses, more like creative art. As a

consequence the advancement of science is unpredictable. Gathering

intelligent individuals together is not the answer to creating breakthroughs.

Without the element of creativity there is unlikely to be any major

breakthroughs, as we see in so many organizations today.12

Reductionist tools like mathematics and geometry have great difficulty

in explaining everyday occurrences like the operation of a steam value, a

tennis game, riding a bicycle, and catching a ball as there is the element of

chaos (not to be confused with crisis) and unpredictability in any

phenomenon. One can develop complex wave equations but never really

know exactly what is going to happen. Reductionism relies upon linear

perfectionism which doesn’t exist. Even the earth’s rotation is not exact.

Our perfectionist time systems must be regularly adjusted to account for

nature’s imperfection.13

We try to think about the world in a linear way

where the world really behaves in non-linear ways. Most events need to

unfold along particular paths, something that cannot be controlled.

Evolution is an unplanned process.

Table 1. Some of the major complex problems facing the World today

Antibiotics European credit and

currency crisis

Racism

China-Taiwan relations Floods Rising food prices

12

Climate change and

global warming

Guantanamo Rising unemployment

Corruption Hate Soil salinity and erosion

Counterfeit medicine Labor shortages Spratly Islands

Decaying infrastructure Migration (Understanding)

sustainability of agriculture

Decline of biodiversity Ozone depletion within

the ionosphere

Urban sprawls

(overdevelopment)

Decline of coastal

fishery stocks

Population growth War and regional conflict

Energy Poverty Water scarcity and

management

Very few humans tend to think far beyond their familiar geographical

territory and immediate future. The majority of our everyday ‘thought flow’

tends to be negative and could reasonably be described as ‘cognitive

garbage’, consisting of random thoughts that lack any substance to be of

any usefulness. We muddle through basing our thinking on unquestioned

patterning influenced by past behavior, beliefs shaped by myths and even

superstitions we gather. Much of what we actually think and do is a

progression and culmination of a series of previous ideas that define the

pathways we follow. Where original ideas were ‘poor ones’, all following

decisions along the defined path will lead to less than ‘optimal’ situations

that eventually accumulate and could lead to a disaster – metaphorically like

drifting into a dark tunnel with no way out. This is reflected in the way the

world economy is being managed, present approaches to poverty

eradication, the history of abandoned medical practices found to be

ineffective, current unsustainable farming practices, poor resource

management,14

and disastrous approaches to river irrigation, coastal

fisheries management,15

and water sharing across major world waterways.16

The decisions we make are primarily dependent upon the context and

circumstances of a particular time and place. For example many countries

focused on national development to promote domestic industries after the

Second World War and started their own automobile industries as an import

replacement strategy. Contemporary development theories at the time

advocated import replacement strategies to assist a developing country save

foreign exchange and create employment17

. However industry protection

measures over time created industrial inefficiency which led to high

domestic prices for automobiles, the inability to create sources of

competitive advantage, with little ability to compete with the rest of the

world. Firms in these import replacement industries struggled to survive and

many industries closed down completely. An import substitution policy

initially brought economic growth, but the industrial base it created became

a basis for economic rigidity and stagnation later on. Management theory

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over the years has also been value laden providing fixed paradigms that

brought particular types of results, i.e., scientific management, Theory Y,

TQM, Industrial democracy, Re-engineering and lean production

techniques. A good decision at one time based on contemporary theories at

the time can become a poor decision at a later time. The contexts, situations,

circumstances, and benchmarks for judging decisions change, thus

creativity is paramount to society to enable flexibility and dynamism

according to changing economic structures and conditions, i.e., the ability to

break out of rigid paradigms.

Creativity embodies the concept of utility, one of the pillars of classical

economics,18

and is more important than ever before as traditional sources

of growth and prosperity are drying up. From an integrated global

perspective, progress in the future will not be about crude wealth formation,

but more about selected growth, redistribution, and stabilization in selected

regions around the globe, much more complex than fostering crude growth,

requiring coordination on a global scale that has never seen before.

3. Thinking, Creativity, and Society

Our understanding of creativity and thinking has been drastically enhanced

through emerging ideas within the biology, genetics, neuroscience, and

evolutionary psychology disciplines. The advent of functional magnetic

resonance imaging (fMRI) and position-emission tomography (PET) which

can measure cerebral blood flow in the brain through sensing magnetic

signals or low level radiation respectively to determine brain activity levels

have greatly deepened our understanding of the cognitive processes

involved.19

Quite remarkably, the cognitive process has many similarities

with computer information processing steps of acquisition, storage,

retrieval, processing, data organization and artificial intelligence structures20

leading to the computer metaphor in the science of cognition.

All our religious doctrines, political ideologies, economic philosophies,

management theories, and technology applications are based on our

collective beliefs and values. Political philosophies of the last century have

been based upon our primal fears of elimination or aspirations about a

defined image of what the future should be, and traditional religious

theologies brought hope of immortality through the promise of forgiveness

of our guilt and an afterlife. We are part of the environment and define it

through our experience, needs, beliefs, values, biases, and motivations.

The paradigm of knowledge has shifted from something seen as factual

and absolute, to a contextual nature. Philosophers and psychologists of the

20th

century changed our conceptuality of knowledge in a massive shift

from the predictable Newtonian order centered on absolute identities of the

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past. Our metaphor of understanding and explaining the environment has

transcended from a detached to an embodied view. Knowledge is a relative

construction, where for example, a coastal foreshore area can be understood

as a hinterland of resources by a geologist, a backdrop for a landscape scene

by a painter, a potential location for settlement by explorers, a place for

children to play, and a romantic place to walk by couples; all deriving

meaning through context, need, aspiration, and experience. There is now

acceptance that the environment embodies multiple realities where meaning

is based upon the context of individual and society.

The importance of creativity can be explained through the metaphor of

the universe as a medium full of drifting matter where distribution and form

changes over time. The universe evolved from being a homogenous

environment of dust particles to becoming a complex haphazard

environment where matter has condensed to form galaxies, clusters, and

super-clusters. Evolution is thus a series of time phased transitions from one

form of matter to another under the influence of energy,21

Therefore the key

to evolution is the ability to reconfigure new combinations of information to

create new knowledge, enacted by energy (discussed later), within our

available resources and capabilities to fit what the environment will accept.

This is creativity.

Creativity and intelligence are two very different cognitive qualities.

Intelligence is more a characteristic and promotes paradigm specific

convergent thinking. Creativity on the other hand is a process and operates

divergently,22

more relevant in finding solutions to problems and

developing new ideas. Creative thinking through various thinking styles

connecting and restructuring information is the process that develops new

combinations of knowledge that manifest new ideas, inventions, and

innovations,23

New ideas must be accepted by peers to catalyze the progression of

society. Sometimes the acceptance of new ideas may take a long period of

time. The delays in acceptance may occur because the significance of some

ideas may not be fully appreciated at the time. The theories of flight and

aerodynamics were not understood until the Wright Brothers found meaning

and significance through experimentation based upon trial and error.

Moreover inventions like Dunlop’s tire may be lost to the world if there is

no apparent immediate application. The tire was only reinvented when an

immediate application (the bicycle and automobile) existed.

What constitutes creativity and original thinking can be very subjective.

There is great argument about whether new ideas and inventions constitute

progress and what simply advocate change for change’s sake or solves

problems people never knew they had. The additional apps and features

built into new mobile phone models are probably not going to advance

society in any way, but may appeal to consumer emotions. Creativity can be

15

distinguished from fad creation, where creativity should incorporate new

visions.

The consequences of creativity may only be discovered some time in the

future. The moving of polluting industries out of Europe to Asia in the

1990s was originally seen as an advantageous move by European

manufacturers in lowering production costs and escaping stringent

environmental regulations within the EU,24

but the consequences of this

were not fully appreciated by policy makers at the time. The absence of

these industries has drastically eroded the EU’s tax base and contributed to

higher unemployment levels.25

The application of creativity is primarily concerned with adaption to a

changing environment. Creativity is culturally, geographically, and

emotionally bound. It is also situational, and time phased. Creativity and

original thinking is concerned with technology, organization, social

disposition and the ethical aspects of our lives. This is an important trait for

a firm to posses in order for it to survive within a dynamic environment.26

The top companies on the “500-lists” in 2020 will most likely be

companies that we don’t even know today. Adaptation is grounded on

adopting new understandings that lead to new meanings that turn the

imagination into the explicit which can be acted upon to create value to

society. Testimony to the failure to adapt is the number of firms that drop

off the “500-lists” into bankruptcy, and the number of firms that rise in

times of recession, replacing failed companies on the “500-lists”.27

Creativity facilitates change and enables evolution within society.

Unlike analytical thinking, creativity and the resulting ideas are rarely

constructed upon tangible evidence and information. It’s an intuitive

process and flourishes at the edge where there is the potential for change.

Creativity is the very catalyst of new knowledge itself, resulting in a new

ideas, inventions, technologies, or business models that translate into

change of society. Creative thinking must therefore transcend the thought

boundaries that society has defined; otherwise society will remain static.

4. Complex Systems and Our Thinking Approaches

The environment is part of a larger system, which is part of a larger system,

which is part of a larger system constituting the ever changing ambiguous

medium that we are immersed within. W. Brian Arthur postulated that

complex systems have three important characteristics.28

Firstly complex

systems grow in co-evolutionary diversity where different entities compete

and collaborate in ever diversified activities, some surviving, while others

perish. Secondly, complex systems are on a continual path of structural

deepening where entities will increase in complexity, and thirdly complex

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systems act as ‘capturing software’ where entities interact with other

entities giving birth to new entities, objects, and events. These three

processes work continuously creating new phenomena where actions are not

totally predictable, e.g., the equities market, human immune system, etc.

Consequently the environment continually reorganizes itself to higher

degrees of complexity, capacity, and meaning, through independent but

interrelated actions, while each entity maintains its own identity and

redefines itself according to the changing requirements of the environment.

Opportunities can be recognized in the market through discovery,29

or

constructed through developing a concept over time30

through actions in the

real world.31

This approach sees opportunity creation much the same as the

process of creating new knowledge, a social construction that makes sense

out of the environment.32

The market system can metaphorically be compared to the ebb and flow

of a tide. The market environment is a culmination of time, place,

technology, society, government, suppliers, customers, and competitors. It’s

an emerging system where new entities, business models, inventions, and

ideas spin off the ‘ebb and flow’ of the possible.33

Entrepreneurial

opportunities exist as rocks uncovered by the ‘ebb and flow’ of the tide. It is

a dynamic construct, a result of the continually interacting elements of the

market system. One invention or innovation may provide a platform for a

host of other innovations to spring into existence just like the railways in

America catalyzed the potentiality of many new industries that fostered

economic growth in the late 1800s and the internet that did the same in the

late 1990s. Innovation drives emergence and maintains the sturdiness of the

market system, continually changing the market structure. The market

structure being the skeleton of the market system could be metaphorically

described as shifting sands along a coastline, regularly eroded by the tide,

molded by the winds, and left with impressions of the footprints of animals,

people, and tracks of vehicles that pass over it.

The market structure consists of companies undertaking various

activities, transport infrastructure, supply chains, distribution points,

bookkeeping systems, money, institutions facilitating exchange, regulatory

bodies, and consumers. The structure is a complex web of reciprocal

relationships where each part relies on the rest of the market structure for

existence; i.e., the market structure cannot exist without each component

and each component cannot exist without the market structure. Existence is

relative to the existence of other entities within the market structure, i.e.,

products cannot exist without the means of exchange, transport, and vice

versa.

The concept of relatedness applies to everything. Man doesn’t have a

masculine self identity until he is in proximity to a woman and vice versa.

Without males and females being side by side together there is no gender

17

awareness. Although being male and female is biological, the gendered self

is determined learning in childhood and the feelings we develop over our

growth and development.34

Likewise Pluto was considered a planet until

2006, an equal member alongside the other eight planets within our solar

system until many other similar objects of similar magnitude to Pluto were

discovered within the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is now controversially described as

a dwarf planet due to the new set of relationships known as Trans-

Neptunian objects (see figure 1). The discovery of the trans-Neptunian

object Sedna in 2003 changed our understanding of the solar system

dramatically. Our knowledge is enhanced through new understandings of

relatedness. Knowledge is not a static constant but rather an emerging

dynamic phenomenon that continually changes our understandings. Our

knowledge is subject to what we know today, which can completely change

tomorrow. This facilitates change.

The ‘ebb and flow’ of the tide embraces complexity. It appears very

simple, but actually is the manifestation of complex interrelationships. The

tide isn’t an object in itself, but has so much influence on what is going on.

The tide defines and shapes the landscape. The tide is invisible but the

effects are clearly visible. The force of a tide can vary in magnitude from a

small wave covering your feet as you walk along a beach to a massive

tsunami that can wipe out coastlines on multiple continents during a single

event like an earthquake. Tide is similar to the invisible effect that occurs

within the environment, appearing simple but with overly complex motions.

The change we see appears simple but the forces behind it are extremely

complex. Most phenomena are just so complex we just see the effects and

can only hypothesize the causes or the motions. The true nature of a tide

isn’t the water as just the true nature of the environment isn’t the individual

constituents within it, i.e., infrastructure, objects, or activities. This is not

something that can be grasped, touched, clearly defined, or truly understand.

The fall of the Soviet Union, the Asian financial crisis, and the economic

crisis of 2008, and the Arab Spring all came with little warning. Ambiguity

is invisible where only the manifestations can be seen, unable to be

correlated to any causes directly, and thus too complex to be understood – it

can only be known, i.e., we can see the effects of gravity, but not gravity

itself.

Figure 1. The concepts of context and relatedness are metaphorically

illustrated by the two grey inner-circles which are both the same size.35

18

From a quantum perspective existence depends upon the relation between

entities and objects. We cannot understand anything in isolation, but only

through what it does.36

The nature of the environment is both a bond

(structure) and a flow (system) that embodies complexity. It is relationship

that gives meaning and forms the tide of the environment – an extremely

powerful concept that gives our identities an existence. Each particle is a

mere abstraction in physics until the interactions with other particles are

understood.37

We see the relationships between things which enable us to

see the ambiguity and contradictions.38

For example, we cannot make sense

of, or understand human beings in isolation. We must focus on the

relatedness, i.e., experience between our self and others. Even the concept

of “I” and “me’ is grounded in relatedness between people. All politics,

diplomacy, economics, are based upon relatedness. The key to

understanding is seeing the relationships and contradictions rather than the

singular entities.

Connections can best be seen where contradictions are perceived;

becoming a starting point for a new understanding of the possible. New

ideas come from where there are errors, not perfections. Errors act as a

trigger to force us to rethink our hypotheses and challenge our

preconceptions. This opens up possibilities to ‘what could be’. Benjamin

Franklin once said “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, is more

valuable and interesting than that of all the discoveries.” Seeing new

connections through relatedness is the basis of new creative insights that

lead to breakthroughs in new knowledge.

We simplistically understand climate change as global warming,

characterized by rising temperatures, changing weather patterns, melting

icecaps, and rising sea levels. We generally believe in the phenomenon

primarily because of greenhouse gases we as a society collectively emit into

the atmosphere. Anybody who argues against this would be labeled a

skeptic or non-believer, protecting vested interests. However a recent study

suggests the relationship between temperature change and higher CO2

levels in the atmosphere are highly exaggerated where atmosphere is not as

sensitive to CO2 levels as was first thought.39

In addition the Arctic and

Antarctic ice caps are growing, and not in decline as many believe,40

leading to confusion, more debate, polarized positioning and even

skepticism.41

In complexity, truths are not absolutes.

In the field of development economics there is little agreement about

strategy and what should be measured as success indicators. The

Millennium Village (MV) project founded by Professor Jeffrey Sachs and

philanthropist Ray Chambers was started with a host of objectives, desires,

and hopes.42

Overwhelming successes were claimed.43

However, these were

strongly questioned from a number of perspectives, with some claiming

19

better results could have been obtained through other strategies.44

Truths are

not absolutes they are relative to what one believes. Any view we have is

only partially the truth. There are many truths – and it is important to

acknowledge that.45

Reality rests upon these multiple truths which

accommodate ambiguity. Creativity is about continually restructuring and

evolving our worldviews to accommodate change and ambiguity. Within

the quantum view one must accept uncertainty upon the premise that we can

never know everything. Instead of using mathematical formulas, we can

only assume probabilities that certain things may happen. Precision does not

exist.

Our lives and the environments we live within have become so complex

that it is exceeding our cognitive abilities to cope. Our brain has developed

frontal lobes over the last two million years making two significant

contributions to the way we think. If we return to the first scene “The dawn

of man” in Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, the beginning of

our species was sparked off by a moment of creativity – the great ape

gaining an insight on how to use a bone as a tool and weapon. Our

prefrontal cortex has given us the ability to make connections. Secondly our

prefrontal cortex gives us the ability to interact, to have empathy, to

imagine, and to manipulate the social surround. Kubrick’s great apes

defended the group – a social action.

However over time we have become preoccupied with our manmade

systems and ignored natural systems, becoming too logical and linear

thinking. The great sociologist Max Weber called this the process of

rationalization. He characterized this rationalization as efficiency,

predictability, calculability, and control over uncertainty, manifested by

rigid bureaucracy,46

the prime means by which we organize our society.

Author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the phenomena as a left

hemisphere dominated society, where the left has no wisdom, just data and

representations, where for example money stands for values and objects,

where maximum utility is sort, where there is need for control, in an

environment where we comply to rules.47

What most don’t realize is that we actually have very little control over

the environment, just an illusion of control. We have developed structures

like bureaucracy and systems like ISO, Six Sigma, and TQM to give the

appearance of order and control around us. But our science is not fact as we

tend to assume. Science is made up of hypotheses about finding

correlations, not necessarily cause and effect, not necessarily fact.

Economics, management and sociology simply reflect our values,

aspirations and fears at the time and thus impasse narrow perspectives upon

environmental phenomena. This is clearly seen in academia today where

according to Tufts Professor Amar Bhídé, most of the big economic

journals today reflect right wing ideology,48

thus suppressing alternative

20

views. People beliefs, expectations, and values influence their views of the

world according to their respective perspectives.49

Change occurs through the development of new ideas, inventions, and

innovations. The environment is a self regulating system evolving through

the trial and error, driven by creative thinkers who take action upon their

ideas. This could be a morphic phenomenon where collective information

becomes an enabler of new emergence, explaining why different groups in

different parts of the world without knowledge of each other or

collaboration can invent the same thing. This drives what Schumpeter called

‘creative destruction’ and what the systems theorists call ‘emergence’, and

is where creative thinking originates. Creative thinking occurs out of the

chaos rather than order of any environment.

Creative thinking is also restricted through our bounding to time and

space.50

What is possible must have the right social, cultural, legal, and

technological ideas, inventions, and innovations in place as prerequisites,

before a new idea, invention, or innovation can exist through what Steven

Johnson calls the ‘adjacent possible’.51

Numerous scientific discoveries

and technological improvements like the steam engine, automobile, or

winged flight, occurred after thousands of cumulative hours of thought

transpired. No single person can be considered fully responsible for these

discoveries or inventions.52

A single idea is a summary of all concepts

which have been learned over the years of living. An idea must be

expressed for creativity to emerge, which is not restricted to any one form.

It could be a narrative, a poem, a model, a picture, or a piece of art.

Any original concept without all necessary ideas, inventions, and

innovations in place will be fantasy rather than something with immediate

potential reality, i.e., the absence of a small engine that could produce

enough thrust over and above its own weight was one of the barriers to

inventing powered flight. The idea of nano-sensors circulating within the

bloodstream to diagnose human ailments currently lacks the ability to

miniaturize such sensors, but will most probably become a reality when the

required nano-technology exists. All new ideas, inventions, and innovations

are created on the foundations of previous works – a summary of all

previous concepts that have been learned over previous years expressed as

an idea, invention or innovation.

For example, an automobile is a compilation of numerous previous

inventions that enable the form of an automobile to exist. Without the ideas

of steel, rubber, fuel, concepts of compression and combustion, electronics,

tires, braking system, new alloys, hydraulic systems, road rules and

carriageways, the automobile cannot exist (see figure 2). The creation of

inventions that become automobiles is a continuous process. Incremental

improvements to the whole idea advance the automobile. New composite

polymer materials and plastics make lighter frames without sacrificing

21

strength, new engine power enhancing systems like turbochargers and fuel

injection systems contribute to the enhancement of car performance. The

automobile is a system of ideas and also forms part of other ideas like

transport systems and city planning, etc. The potential reality is limited by

knowledge and imagination.

The inter-connectiveness of everything is so entangled that looking at

the separate parts of any system will tell us very little about the functioning

of the whole. Anything without the context of the rest of the system has

little meaning, i.e., tires, a braking system, or a chassis will tell us little

about an automobile itself. Everything must exist in relation to other things

in order to have meaning. To the inventor who is making connections,

finding the related meanings between the different objects is the key to

ingenuity. It’s the new meaning that ingenuity provides that advances

society.

Automobile

Chassis Engine Tires Control &

Management

Systems

Braking System Environment

Suspension

Systems

Fuel Rubber Electronics Alloys Road Rules

Steel Compression

&

Combustion

Chemical

Processes

Microprocessors

Transistor

Hydraulics

Laws of Fluids

Roads &

carriageways

Horse &

Buggy

Plantations Heat

Processes

Engineering

principles

Figure 2. Time and Space: It was the previous ideas and inventions that

existed before an invention like the automobile was possible.

The invention process is subject to multiple realities. Entrepreneurs develop

new ideas upon their prior knowledge, existing technology and inventions.

Any new invention is based on the past and is a projection into the future.

Thus the entrepreneur stands on the origin of possibilities and projects his or

her imagination along a new vector of reality of choosing. For example,

22

Anita Roddick’s holiday in America and visit to the Body Shop operated by

sisters Peggy Short and Janet Saunders in Berkeley California, triggered her

to imagine a new reality of ethically based retail outlets around the world.

Without entrepreneurs standing at the origin of possibilities and envisaging

a different future, society could never change. Had each entrepreneur

chosen a different way to go, different realities to what was created would

now exist. An entrepreneur is the creator of new realities.

5. Thought Cognition

The cognitive functioning of the mind is no longer a mysterious black box.

Over the last fifty years we have developed a much deeper understanding

about how we think. With the work of Pierre Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke

in the 19th Century, the different functioning of the left and right

hemispheres of the brain began to become vaguely understood. This

understanding was greatly enhanced with the work of Michael Gazzaniga

and Roger Wolcott Sperry on functional lateralization and how the two

hemispheres communicate with each other when the corpus callosum that

transfers signals between the two hemispheres was severed with split-brain

patients.53

After further work by Robert E. Ornstein, a strong consensus

developed that the brain was fully conscious in both hemispheres carrying

out perception, thinking, storing and retrieving memory simultaneously, but

at the same time providing different and conflicting views of the world.

Julian Jaynes hypothesized in his controversial book The Origin of

Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that the brain was

indeed divided with a dominant left part that spoke and a subservient right

that obeyed – hence the bicameral mind.54

Although at the time Jaynes saw

bicameralism as metaphoric, advances in cerebral imaging in the 1990s

confirmed his early predictions.55

Jaynes postulated that we have a schizoid

tendency due to hemispherical conflict in the way each hemisphere thinks,

which heavily influenced beliefs about consciousness at the time. These

ideas about split brain functioning were taken up by academics and

practitioners in the creativity and education fields.

The functions of the brain was described as split into two hemispheres

where the left side was believed to be sequential, concerned with facts,

splitting the world into concrete and identifiable categories, logical

reasoning, linear thinking splitting things apart, mathematically orientated,

and the centre of words and language. Thus the left hemisphere is able to

bring narrow and sharply focused attention to detail. On the other side, the

right looked at the environment in a holistic manner looking at the whole,

visually and spatially orientated, seeking similarities through analogy,

23

thinking in images, and thus able to believe, be vigilant over the

environment, and transform ideas.

Our education system has been orientated towards developing general

intelligence and critical thinking, all left traits. This is probably due to belief

in the 1960’s that left side traits were more important in earning an income.

This is clearly reflected in the learning taxonomy developed by Benjamin

Bloom in the 1950s.

Edward De Bono brought predominating focus upon the right

hemisphere of the brain as the centre of holistic or what he called lateral

thinking, where creativity was thought to be derived.56

At that time it was

believed that the dominance of one side and corresponding thinking styles

would suit specific activities, i.e., left side dominance would suit activities

like learning languages, mathematics, engineering, and reading, while right

side dominance would better suit activities like social science, education

and the visual arts57

. From a gender perspective it was considered that right

dominance would enable superior interpersonal skills and would be more

common in women and left hand dominance which promoted logical

reasoning would be more common in men.58,59

which supported Anglo

Saxon arguments about male dominance in the Victorian era and influenced

vocational guidance right up to recent times.

The divided brain paradigm was reinforced by medical schools where

students would examine brain anatomy to see the clear division of the brain

down the centre. For many years child psychologists and educators would

look at children’s hand orientation as a rough indication of brain

hemisphere dominance.60

As it was believed that the left hemisphere was

most important to develop scholastically, most children were encouraged to

be right handed which was controlled by the left hand side of the brain.

This belief in the way we thought was built upon by Ned Herrmann a

physicist who worked within the human resource department of General

Electric. After years of research in creativity of the human brain Hermann

developed a metaphorical model of how the four quadrants of the brain have

specialized functions.61

Herrmann believed the brain works as a coalition of

four quadrants that carry out specialized functions. Quadrants A and B are

superimposed over the left side of the brain which is sequential and time-

bound and quadrants C and D are superimposed over the right hand side of

the brain which is holistic and timeless. Quadrant A thinkers think in terms

of words and numbers, logically and analytically. They are achievement

orientated and most people are trained and educated in this way.62

Quadrant

B thinkers are task-orientated and result driven in the way they organize

facts and plan. Quadrant C thinkers are intuitive and rely on interpersonal

stimulations and quadrant D thinkers are conceptualizing, imaginative and

holistic.63

The four quadrants are the basis of our thinking preferences

which determine how we prefer to learn, understand and express things in

24

what are called cognitive preferences or preferred modes of knowing.64

People tend to think from different positions within the whole brain

metaphor. Each quadrant works in tandem in varying degrees within

individuals. When faced with a situation or problem we use our preferred

way of thinking to make sense and solve the problem. When people are

anchored toward one mode, other modes of thinking are avoided. This

greatly affects our intake of information, comprehension of a situation and

overall learning capabilities.65

However this was not reflective upon how the brain really worked.

Functions that were previously believed to only occur on one side of the

brain were found to actually occur on both sides, and it was found that the

corpus callosum played a very important coordinating role, which can vary

from person to person.66

In addition, our whole understanding of

intelligence was beginning to be redefined both in terms of concept and

application.67

Traditional general intelligence was not the only form we

have. We have many different forms of intelligence which vary in

importance according to the time, location and situation we exist within.

The talents and abilities of a New York stockbroker differ from an Olympic

marathon runner, an advocating lawyer in a courtroom, a geologist, and an

Australian aboriginal living off the land in Central Australia. No one can

say which of these people are more intelligent as the necessary talents,

abilities, and underlying intelligences differ just as the tasks, applications,

and required outcomes differ.

Our increasing understanding of the role of the prefrontal cortex through

both cerebral imaging and examination of brain damaged patients indicated

that it is the thinking processes that are of upmost importance in applying

intelligence to problems and challenges we face. The prefrontal cortex is

the centre where we are able to distinguish differences in people, objects,

and events and develop premeditated time phased actions, choose between

alternatives based on set criteria and values, override unacceptable action

pathways that the limbic system may bring attention to. Thus the prefrontal

cortex is able to filter and inhibit inappropriate thought, emotions, and

distractions.68

The prefrontal cortex receives highly filtered data from the senses. It

combines this data with selective memory recall69

to construct a map of

reality that enables us to see the world within our own context. This divides

our reality into, and connects past, present, future together through both

cross temporal and modal association and deliberate potential actions70

– a

totally relational system.

Consequently the prefrontal cortex is a top-down processor rather than

the bottom up limbic system that encourages action through emotional

generation. The prefrontal cortex can also be seen as an integrator of the

two hemispheres, limbic system, senses, and memory functions. Both

25

reason and imagination originate from the prefrontal cortex where both

processes require all facets of the mind rather than being exclusively

domiciled in any one hemisphere. The prefrontal cortex must integrate the

left hemisphere’s narrow focused and categorized view of the world which

lock us into particular patterns with the right hemisphere’s overall open

view seeing the world more as a system – as the right hemisphere sees and

this needs to be made sense of by the left hemisphere which categorizes

what the right sees. A mental map is constructed which will differ from

others in the degree of balance between left and right hemisphere

domination.

The prefrontal cortex selects data that creates our mental maps filtered

with set patterns, values and beliefs contained within neurologically

constructed schemata stored within the memory. Where thoughts, desires,

feelings, and ideas are not consistent with the values and beliefs within

these schemata, feelings of confusion, puzzlement, surprise, guilt and/or

remorse may emerge due to the conflicting way reality is interpreted.71

These types of conflicts must be resolved through reason, imagination and

emotion. Sometimes this leads to great new insights where new connections

are made integrating into what could be called reasoned imagination. The

role of emotion is to draw attention to important triggers and keys in the

process. Due to the empathic nature of the prefrontal cortex, we see

relationships between people, things and events. Creativity and original

thinking is about seeing these relationships. At other times emotions trigger

the initiation of any of a vast array of defense mechanisms that may lead to

some forms of dysfunctional thinking.72

From this point of view it could be

argued that our conscious awareness resides within the prefrontal cortex

and connected tracts leading to the rest of the brain.73

The world we

experience is as much a product of our mind as it is the environment.

The brain is a self organizing system full of neural connections.

Probably one of the closest explanations to how our brain processes

information in the recognition process is the neural network model.74

Information is broken up and stored in nodes that connects with other pieces

of information through the dendrite of a neuron (a branched tree like

structure) to terminal buttons at the end of axons (thin branches of neural

cells), where the terminal buttons connect to the dendrites of other cells at

the synapse (junction between the terminal button of one neuron and the

dendrite of another neuron). These neuron connections are numerous

creating (or arranging) our thoughts from a relational database of

information that can be assembled to form meaning when electrical

impulses go above a threshold that makes us aware of a piece of

information.

Neural networks accommodate learning through changing the weights of

node activation through excitatory or inhibitory actions. This improves the

26

efficiency of the network in making identifications through being able to

process information in parallel, through both top-down and bottom-up

processing. This enables a person to look, in the case of writing, either at

the word level, letter level, and feature level, which implies we can interpret

incomplete words and sentences.75

The controlling mechanism of

communications (i.e., connections) between neurons is located within the

prefrontal cortex.76

6. Memory and Prior Knowledge

Our memory stores information about people, objects, and events; in

something like a web of connections explained above. We are not exactly

sure where memory is stored, but it is believed to be around areas of the

brain responsible for language, vision, and hearing, etc, connected through

millions of complex synapses. The hippocampus performs the role as a

mediator in forming memory and as a coordinator in connecting the

respective memory centers of the brain.77

Consequently information is not

stored whole and divided into relational bits. Recent research has shown

that when new experiences occur, a gene activates within the hippocampus

that triggers modifications in neural connections by adjusting the strength of

the synapses.78

Our life experiences, knowledge, knowhow, values, and beliefs are all

stored within the neural systems within our memory. Prior knowledge is

information and knowledge a person accumulates over their lifetime.79

As

one’s experience grows the mental matrix of prior knowledge becomes

richer and more complex. However prior knowledge is not all truth, it is

made of perception, beliefs, and imagination which make up the

components of our memory (see figure 3) – our constructed reality.

The content of prior knowledge can be demonstrated by thinking about

Leonardo da Vinci’s mural Il Cenacola or The last Supper . In the picture

many people believe that a holy chalice is present. On viewing the painting

one will find there is actually no holy chalice on the table whatsoever

(however there are cups). This is how our beliefs developed through

Biblical stories around the last supper shape and influence our mental

construction of what we would expect to see, i.e., how we construct our

reality. Our prior knowledge as well as being influenced by the world

around us also influences our general perception of the world.

27

Knowledge Belief Truth

Imagination

Memory

Figure 3. Prior knowledge consists of truth, belief, knowledge, imagination, and

memory.

We build up knowledge upon a pool of metaphors as a way to comprehend

and construct meaning about the environment around us.80

The advantage of

metaphor is that it can be loosely applied to contextual situations in a

flexible manner to help clarify uncertainty through analogy. Metaphors

make things more familiar to us and if they can explain new experiences to

our satisfaction, our current schemata and emotions are reinforced. Through

the use of metaphor, prior knowledge assists in problem solving by

providing simpler analogies where complex cause and effect cannot be

easily understood and evaluated. Metaphors help a person make sense of

their experiences, perceptions, develop plans for the future, and

communicate these ideas to others.81

For example, business strategy is often

referred to through sport and war analogies which make concepts easier to

understand and visualize. In a similar manner, blood circulation is often

explained in pumping and pressure analysis.

Metaphor is not restricted to narrative and relies very heavily upon

mental imagery. Spatial based mental imagery is extremely important in

conceptualizing and solving problems. Imagery is powerful in arousing

emotion as we see when the majority of people are exposed to sexually

explicit and violent material. Mental imagery originates within the visual

cortex located in the occipital lobe in the posterior of the brain, thus sharing

the same processing space with the visual perception area.82

Much of our

imagination is generated in the visual mode which is sometimes confused

with reality.83

Imagery is a composite picture just like a mental map. We cannot

reconstruct an entire image of a scene we can only make a composite

simulation, which is actually what we also do when we look at a scene

through our eyes84

- remember the Last Supper example. What we see is the

28

composite we construct and not reality. Images cannot however serve as

concepts or ideas themselves, they can only serve as the meaning of words

like a dictionary.85

Metaphorical language evolves into existing imagery and narrative

frameworks within prior knowledge, where ideas can be shared with others.

If current metaphors cannot explain our interpretations of current

experiences and solve particular problems, then new experiences need to be

blended in with prior knowledge to create a modified schemata and new

emotions. This overtime develops much more sophisticated and richer

mental models which assist us when issues and problems we consider

become much more complex – the development of wisdom.86

Experience differs from knowledge in that it introduces feeling and

emotion. For example one could read about snorkeling and diving but until

one has gone diving where they can feel the pressure and experience the

undersea life, knowledge has no feeling. As individuals experience things

differently, i.e., diving around the surface verses diving at the depth of 25

feet and diving in clear tropical waters verses murky lake water. To a great

degree knowledge is individually orientated. No one has the same

experience of the same event and this adds to the concept of understanding

as something relative rather than absolute. The enrichment and

transformation of our schemata over time occurs through learning and

experience.87

The key to our ability to continue learning is to be able to

integrate the knowledge we acquire with the knowledge we already have.

The belief and imagination components of prior knowledge influence

our thinking and decision making processes. Our current beliefs are like an

anchor that prevents us from thinking of new ideas. We are also strongly

influenced by the beliefs of others and emotions tied to similar past

experiences.88

Prior knowledge manifests as stereotyping which assists a person

comprehend a story and judge its plausibility, bringing in judgments and

biases to our thinking.89

In addition, biases guide our decision pathways.

Any first decisions we make on any matter creates a pathway upon which

future decisions will be guided. Biases tend to keep us on a consistent path

through an “escalation of commitment”, even though we may know that the

original decision was wrong.

We are also bound by culture. Culture has a strong bearing on our ability

to be creative both at a social and organizational level. For example, culture

influences how employees feel in a workplace; are people linked or work

within a ranked hierarchy?, do people seek ideas through collaboration or

take on ‘top-down’ ideas?, are people empowered or controlled?, do people

exist within an environment of ambiguity or certainty?, do people make

decisions spontaneously and intuitively or through formal processes and

procedures?, is the organization flexible and quick to act or inflexible and

29

slow to act?, and does management make work play or work under an

environment of seriousness?

Creativity and original thinking is about making new connections, i.e.,

developing new neural networks. Thus our thinking is limited by the

knowledge we already have within our memory and the process of how we

integrate new perceptions into existing prior knowledge. As perceptions are

influenced by our beliefs and biases, new ideas are actually the result of

logical hindsight rather than foresight.90

Therefore creativity can be seen as

being a restructuring of our knowledge to fit the elements of the problems

we face. In these cases the role of creativity is to find new ways to define a

problem so it can be solved with the knowledge we have. From this

perspective the mind’s self organizing system is restricted by the boundaries

of environmental perception and our prior knowledge, placing limits on the

scope of possible emerging ideas.

Virtually no idea or invention has occurred in isolation. We learn

through various methods from others i.e., James Watt used pre-existing

knowledge to develop his version of the steam engine. New ideas and

inventions tend to be incremental steps rather than breakthroughs outside

the bounding of prior knowledge. Humans are social animals and

communication is central to our evolving thinking. As our prior knowledge

increases through social interaction, learning and experience, so does the

number of potential possibilities for making new connections that lead to

new constructions, just as our ability to speak a foreign language increases

exponentially once we know the basic syntax rules and increase our

vocabulary.

The way our cognition system is designed and the role prior knowledge

plays is extremely useful for people carrying out their work like doctors

making a diagnosis, mechanics inspecting an engine for faults, airline pilots,

and farmers, etc., doing the routine parts of their jobs. Prior knowledge

guides them through a number of frames each representing pre-existing

mental models through which they perceive – shaping our reasoning and

decision making process. This is also the basis of their specialist intuition.91

Any new idea is anchored to our life experience, formally or informally

acquired knowledge and associated emotions attached to vision that enables

new connections.92

The key to original thinking is reflection, plasticity and

flexibility at both the neural and thinking levels.

7. Imagination

Imagination is the ability to form mental images, phonological passages,

analogies, or narratives of something that is not perceived through our

senses. Imagination is a manifestation of our memory and enables us to

30

scrutinize our past and construct hypothetical future scenarios that do not

yet, but could exist. Imagination also gives us the ability to see things from

other points of view and empathize with others.

Imagination extends our experience and thoughts, enabling a personal

construction of a world view that lowers our sense of uncertainty.93

In this

way our imagination fills in the gaps within our knowledge enabling us to

create mental maps that make meaning out of the ambiguities of situations

we face where information is lacking,94

which is an important function of

our memory management. This partly explains why people react differently

to what they see due to the unique interpretations they make based on

different prior knowledge and experience. Imagination enables us to create

new meanings from cognitive cues or stimuli within the environment, which

on occasions can lead to new insights.

Our knowledge and personal goals are embedded within our imagination

which is at the heart of our existence, a cognitive quality that we would not

be human without.95

Imagination is the means novelists use to create their

stories.96

The Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk imagined a world he

retreated into as a child where he was someone else, somewhere else in

creating the narrative and story of his novel “Istanbul”. Imagination is

needed in marketing to create new value sets to consumers that separate

new products from others. This requires originality to create innovation97

.

Imagination is the essence of marketing opportunity98

that conjures up

images and entices fantasy to consumers, allowing them to feel what it

would be like to live at Sanctuary Cove in Northern Queensland, Australia,

receiving a Citibank loan, driving a Mercedes 500 SLK around town, or

holidaying in Bali. Imagination aids our practical reasoning99

and opens up

new avenues of thinking, reflection, allowing a mentally reorganized world,

to enable concepts of doing things differently. Imagination decomposes

what already is, replacing it with what could be, and is the source of hope

fear, enlightenment, and aspirations.

Imagination is not a totally conscious process. New knowledge may

incubate subconsciously when a person has surplus attention to focus on

recombining memory and external stimuli into new meanings. Most people

tend to spend a great deal of time while they are awake “daydreaming”,

where attention shifts away from the present mental tasks to an unfolding

sequence of private responses.100,101

This may be enough to activate our

default network, a web of autobiographical mental imagery, which may

provide new connections and perspectives about a problem we have been

concerned with. Recent research has shown that the brain periodically shifts

phase locking during a person’s consciousness,102

where neural networks

activate and these brief periods may be enough to allow the dominant left

hemisphere give way to the right hemisphere, enabling a person to see the

environment, problem or issue from a new perspective.103

This has been

31

corroborated with research that found where people engage in mildly

demanding intellectually challenging tasks during breaks from work that

they are doing, there is a higher probability of finding solutions to problems

that they have been engaged within their primary activity.104

These

processes originate from the prefrontal cortex where we imagine ourselves

and the feelings of others, the posterior cingulate cortex connecting our

personal memories throughout the brain, and the parietal cortex connecting

the hippocampus which is reported to store episodic memories.105

Unguided imagination (or what was once termed “free association”)

through dreaming and “daydreaming” enables the gathering of information

from different parts of our memory, which may not be easy to access

consciously. This information may come from a within a narrow domain or

a much wider field. The more imagination takes account of the wider field,

experience, and prior knowledge, the more likely these ideas created

through imagination will have some originality – through complex

knowledge restructuring. Allen McConnell writing about Steve Jobs in

Psychology Today postulated that the large array of fonts designed for the

Macintosh computer were inspired from Job’s interest and knowledge about

typography he learned while doing a calligraphy class at Reed.106

It was

Job’s imagination of seeing an array of fonts in the Macintosh that made it

reality. There are very few serendipitous occurrences in creative insight.

Most are the result of triggers and slow incubation periods that lead to a

revelation.107

Marsh and Bower called the above types of insights inadvertent

plagiarism.108

Most cases of insight were inspired by something in the past;

although though imagery these new concepts may have been given new

types of manifestations. It is through the imagery of analogies that many

breakthroughs in science have been achieved.109

Einstein developed his

insight for the theory of relativity through imagining what would happen if

he travelled at the speed of light, Faraday claimed to have visualized force

lines from electric and magnetic fields from a wood fire giving insight into

the theory of electromagnetic fields and kekulé reported that he gained

insight into the shape of the benzene molecule after he imagined a snake

coiled up in a circle.

Imagination is a multidimensional concept and encompasses a number

of different modes which can be described as follows;

1. Effectuative imagination combines information together to synergize

new concepts and ideas. However these are often incomplete and need to be

enhanced, modified, and/or elaborated upon as more information from the

environment comes to attention and is reflected upon. Effectuative

imagination can be either guided or triggered by random thoughts, usually

stimulated by what a person experiences within the framework of their past

experience. Effectuative imagination may also incubate from pondering

32

over a specific problem within the occasional attention of a person.

Effectuative imagination is extremely flexible and allows for continuous

change. This is an important ingredient in entrepreneurial planning, strategy

crafting, particularly in opportunity construction, development, and

assembling all the necessary resources required to exploit any

opportunity.110

Effectuative imagination also leads to other forms of

imagination that assists in the construction of concepts, ideas, and action

scenarios. Effectuative imagination enables flexibility in our thinking.

2. Intellectual (or constructive) imagination is utilized when considering

and developing hypotheses from different pieces of information or

pondering over various issues of meaning say in the areas of philosophy,

management, or politics, etc. Intellectual imagination originates from a

definite idea or plan and thus is guided imagination as it has a distinct

purpose which in the end must be articulated after a period of painstaking

and sometimes meticulous endeavor. This can be very well illustrated with

Charles Darwin’s work which resulted in the development of his hypothesis

explained in his book The Origin of Species which took almost two decades

to gestate and complete. Darwin collected information, analyzed it,

evaluated and criticized the findings, and then reorganized all the

information into new knowledge in the form of a hypothesis.111

This can be

a long drawn out process, sometime decades long, with intermittent periods

of high intensity and other periods where very little thought is given to the

problem. Intellectual imagination is a very conscious process, although it

may slip into other forms of imagination that enable new insights.

3. Imaginative fantasy creates and develops stories, pictures, poems,

stage-plays, and the building of the esoteric, etc. This form of imagination

may be based upon the inspiration of some fact or semi-autobiographical

experiences (James Bond), extrapolated or analogized into new persona and

events (Star Trek) that conform to or stretch the realms of reality into

magic, supernatural mythology and folklore (The kane Chronicles, King

Arthur). Imaginative fantasy may be structural with mythical people in real

world settings (The Planet of the Apes), past, present, or future, with real

people in mythical settings (Lost in Space). Fantasy may totally disregard

the rules of society (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), science and nature (The

Time Machine, Back to the Future), or extrapolate them into the future with

science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey). Fantasy can also be based upon

human emotions (Romeo and Juliet), distorted historical facts (The Patriot),

historical times and political issues (Dr. Strangelove), take a theme and

fantasize it (1984, Animal Farm), encapsulate dark fantasy (Wag the Dog),

or evoke urban legend (The Stepford Wives, Dusk to Dawn). Imaginative

fantasy can be a mixture of guided and unguided imagination and is

important to artists, writers, dancers, and musicians, etc.

33

4. Empathy is a capacity we have to connect to others and feel what they

are feeling. Empathy helps a person know emotionally what others are

experiencing from their frame and reference.112

Empathy allows our mind

‘to detach itself from one’s self’ and see the world from someone else’s

feelings, emotions, pain, and reasoning.113

Empathy can assist us in seeing

other realities, alternative meanings of situations, which may consist of

many layers. Empathy shows us that there are no absolutes, just alternative

meanings to situations.114

Empathy links us to the larger community and

thus important to human survival in enabling us to understand what is

required to socially coexist with others. Empathy shows that realities

sometimes conflict. Seeing conflicting realities is a sign that we are starting

to know. Howard Gardner postulates that the concept of empathy should

also include our empathy with nature and our place within it.115

High ego-

centricity leads to reduced empathy and the inability to see other

viewpoints. However recent studies on narcissistic individuals has shown

that there are two types of empathy, affective empathy discussed above and

cognitive empathy which involves the ability of people to see person’s

emotional state without being able to feel what they are feeling.116

Lack of

empathy can also be compensated by strategizing and spontaneous

mentalizing to manipulate others to their advantage. These Machiavellian

personalities don’t necessarily feel the same emotions as those with

empathy receive, so don’t feel guilty when manipulating others.117

This type

of behavior can be seen in short-term mating strategies by males.118

Besides

being extremely important in interpersonal relationships, empathy is an

important tool for competitive strategy as it enables one to think about how

our competitors would react to our moves and what they would do.

Branding can also be considered a result of empathy as branding is designed

to try and capture connections with potential customers by appealing to

their emotions, self identity and aspirations.

5. Strategic imagination is concerned about vision of ‘what could be’, the

ability to recognize and evaluate opportunities by turning them into mental

scenarios, seeing the benefits, identifying the types and quantities of

resources required for taking particular actions, and the ability to weigh up

all the issues in a strategic manner. A vision helps a person focus upon the

types of opportunities suited to their disposition. This sense of vision is

guided by a person’s assumptions, beliefs and values within the psych.

Vision has varying strengths in different people depending upon their ego

characteristics and motivations. The ability to spot and evaluate

opportunities is closely linked with a person’s imagination, creative

thinking, propensity to action, and perceptions of their talents and available

skills. According to Bolton and Thompson entrepreneurs spot particular

opportunities and extrapolate potential achievable scenarios within the

limits of their skills and ability to gather resources to exploit the

34

opportunity.119

These extrapolations from opportunity to strategy require

both visual/spatial and calculative thinking skills at a strategic rather than

detailed level. Adequate concentration is required in order to have a

strategic outlook upon things. This requires focus in strategic thinking,

creativity, a sense of vision, and empathy. Strategic (and also intellectual)

imagination can be utilized through thought experiments, the process of

thinking through a scenario for the purpose of thinking through the

consequences. Too little focus will result in random jumping from potential

opportunity to opportunity without undertaking any diligent mental

evaluations. Too much focus may result in narrow mindedness and even

obsessive thinking which would result in either blindness to potential

opportunities or at the other end of the scale taking action without truly

“objective” evaluation. Strategic imagination in some cases is a form of

wisdom.

6. Emotional imagination is concerned with manifesting emotional

dispositions and extending them into emotional scenarios. Without any

imagination, emotion would not be able to emerge from our psych and

manifest as feelings, moods, and dispositions. Fear requires the imagination

of what is fearful, hate requires imagination about what is repulsive, and

worry requires the imaginative generation of scenarios that make one

anxious. Through emotional imagination, beliefs are developed through

giving weight to imaginative scenarios that generate further sets of higher

order emotions. Emotional imagination operates at the unconscious and

semi-unconscious level. People who show excessive emotional imagination

would most probably be defined as exhibiting psychotic tendencies.

Emotional imagination is one of the most powerful types of our imagination

and can easily dominate our thinking processes.

7. Dreams are an unconscious form of imagination made up of images,

ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur during certain stages of sleep.

Dreams show that every concept in our mind has its own psychic

associations and that ideas we deal with in everyday life are by no means as

precise as we think.120

Our experiences become sublimed into our memory

passing into the unconscious where the factual characteristics can change,

and can be reacquired at any time. According to Jung, dreams are the

invisible roots of our consciousness,121

and connect us to our unconscious.

However the meaning of dreams is can only be based on our speculative

interpretation. Some dreams are very straight forward, while others surreal,

magical, melancholic, adventurous, and sexual where we are most of the

time not in control.

8. Memory reconstruction is the process of retrieving our memory of

people, objects, and events. Our memory is made up of prior knowledge

consisting of a mix of truth and belief, influenced by emotion. Recurring

memory therefore carries attitudes, values, and identity as most of our

35

memory is within the “I” or “me” paradigm. Memory is also reconstructed

to fit into our current view of the world, so is very selective. The process of

memory reconstruction occurs within our subconscious emerging into our

consciousness without us being really being aware of the source elements,

i.e., what is fact and what is belief. Memory reconstruction is assimilative

and can construct new knowledge out of random facts, beliefs and

experiences which may lead to insight.

Each form of imagination outlined above certainly overlaps and may

operate in tandem. Imaginative thinking provides the ability to move

towards objectives, and travel along selected paths. Imagination is much

more divergent than logical thought, as imagination can move freely across

fields and disciplines, while logical thinking is orientated along a narrowly

focused path. From this perspective imagination is probably more important

than knowledge as knowledge without application is useless. Imagination

enables us to apply knowledge.

However imagination can also be dysfunctional. Personality disorders

and the emerging emotion can dominate our imagination with fear, anxiety,

paranoia, and/or narcissistic tendencies, etc.122

This may prevent a person

from imagining new alternatives to their current goals and behavior, thus

allowing their past fears and anxieties to dominate their thinking.123

Imagination can consciously or unconsciously dissociate a person from the

reality of their everyday life where they may fall into the life of fantasy.

Abstract imagination can very quickly take a person away from reality

where current problems are ignored in favor of fantasy.124

8. Emotion

Cognition as a discipline has emerged over the last sixty years with the

brain as a computer metaphor, leaving the study of emotion to behavioral

psychology. But recent research has determined that our cognitive

processing has an emotional element, and is paramount for effective

functioning.125

Our thinking and decision making is influenced by two

distinct, yet interwoven processes. One involves conscious deliberation and

analysis through the prefrontal cortex where facts are considered and

weighed, options generated and compared with reasoning to determine an

outcome. The second system is non-conscious rapid emoto-based pattern

recognition with emotionally weighted biases.126

Emotion triggers

memories, and perceptions, and memories also trigger emotions which

define the nature of our existence relative to the past and future, and our

sense of power over any situation.

Emotions are part of our fundamental irrationality and unpredictability

and thus an important influence in creativity and original thinking. Our

36

basic emotions come from inner extra-rational dynamics deep within our

psych that are expressed as feelings, dreams, fantasies, and other imagined

aspects of our lives.127

Our more complex emotions like loyalty, sympathy,

pride, confidence, achievement, embarrassment, indignation, bewilderment,

pity, elation, satisfaction, boredom, shame, disgust, frustration, and surprise,

etc, tend to be socially related and constructed.128

Everything we perceive

evokes some form of feeling and the process of creativity, innovation and

invention is always an emotional and even sensual experience in people as

concepts are translated into words, numbers, diagrams, or objects, leading to

something inspirational.129

Emotions decide what we like, dislike, what is

agreeable, disagreeable, giving meaning to our world. Emotions can

sometimes help us see similar patterns across fields without conscious

deliberation and plays an important role in signaling preferences for

opportunities by arousing positive emotions, kindling enthusiasm and

determining our reactions to shocks and the behavioral trajectories we take.

Our view of the world is filtered through emotions which guides our self

awareness to a past or future orientation. Our thinking is swayed by our

time orientation within an emotion matrix depicted in figure 4. Any past

orientation will be full of stories which influence our sense of meaning

about the present. Some of the stories we remember will be full of regret for

past mistakes, disappointment for what was not done, or full of satisfaction

and/or pride for what was achieved. The past influences our interpretation

of the present. Positive and negative experiences influence what we

perceive, contemplate and put our focus upon in the now. The positive and

negative memories of the past also guide our direction in the future. Positive

memories guide us towards action where we have a high sense of self

efficacy and negative memories tend to make us averse to taking action

where we have a low sense of self efficacy. The future represents our

positive hopes and aspirations, or negative fears and anxieties where

positive emotions may lead to a sense of high self efficacy and become

powerful motivators for action, while negative emotions may lead to sense

of low self efficacy feasibility and take an averse attitude towards action.

Extreme feelings of low or high self efficacy can lead to either reckless

overconfidence in a positive emotional state or an aversion from action out

of fear and anxiety in a negative emotional state. The same feelings are not

uniform across the all activities, where a person may feel a high sense of

self efficacy in some areas and low sense of self efficacy in other areas.

37

Present

Orientation

Future Orientation

Past Orientation

Memory

Imagination

Belief System

Patterning

Optimal learning

Sense of

high self

efficacy

Sense of

low self

efficacy

Bad memories Good memories

Negative emotions Positive emotions

Action adverse Reckless overconfidence

Heuristics Imagination

Optimal drive

Value sets

Figure 4. The emotion matrix

There is a strong nexus between our experiences, prior knowledge and

emotion. We see the world through the perspective of our own identity

shaped by our emotions. The interaction of experience, prior knowledge and

emotion leads to the formation of our beliefs, which lay the foundation of

our values and aspirations, expressed through patterning, and sets of

heuristics which guide our thinking and decision making. The above

dynamics fuels our imagination which translates our memory, into beliefs,

aspirations, and emotions into scenarios that create feelings of self efficacy,

motivation, energy, and drive. Our optimal position for learning is within

the present orientation where the influence of future fears and hopes, past

disappointments and successes are minimized and within our conscious

awareness. Too much past or future orientation may lead to personal

delusion such as unrealistic hopes that an entrepreneurial opportunity really

exists,130

or massive overconfidence in one’s ability to successfully

implement a complex strategy in the field. Alternatively too much future or

past orientation may lead to undue pessimism where the feeling of self

efficacy and motivation is low, leading to states of anxiety and inaction.

Orientation in the past will anchor one into previous patterns of success,

which promote rigidity, while too much orientation into the future may lead

38

to fantasy, thus leading to unrealistic objectives and the ability to consider

realistic scenarios.131

The impact of our past and future orientation and sense of self efficacy

upon our behavior is strong. Emotion is embedded within our culture and

forms part of our domicile outlook.132

Philip Zimbardo postulated that

people living in tropical climates where there is little change in the weather

and where a language has no future tense leads to an inept propensity for

action.133

Rural youth unemployment within developing and post industrial

societies appear to be developing a generation of youth that feels little hope

about the future, while societies in countries like Malaysia where sections of

the population seek to cling to the order of the past may do little to prepare

for the challenges of the future. Max Weber attributed the rise of capitalism

in Europe to the present and future orientated Protestant work ethic and the

relative backwardness of Catholic centered Europe to the past orientation of

Catholic doctrines.134

Our emotional orientation influences our pace of life,

belief systems, aspirations and propensity for action.

9. Energy

Recently, the concept of energy has been related to a person’s ability to be

creative.135

However there is very little agreement on the definition of

energy, what it really is, what it does and no way has been found to actually

measure it directly.136

A number of different types and terms for human

energies have been cited, but probably out of these, three are of importance

and are somewhat interrelated.

The first of three energies is our physical energy that is necessary to do

physical things like moving from place to place, running, sports, and any

other activity that requires kinesthetic movement. Our physical energy is

managed by food for fuel, rest and exercise to build strength and discipline.

The next energy is our emotional energy which enables the expression of

our general emotions like happiness, surprise, hate, envy, and jealousy, etc.

Emotional energy helps to give us focus, interest and attention to different

things we sense, encounter, or exposed to and is one of our primal

mechanisms to keep us alert to danger in the environment.137

Finally there is

our mental energy which fuels our ability to make calculations and

undertake judgments. Sometimes emotional energy and intelligences are

called psychic energy, but breaking them into two separate energies allows

us to understand the very different roles they play in our life.

The level of energy we have either supports or inhibits our creativity and

problem solving abilities. These three energies are all interrelated, where for

example a physically tired person will not perform mental calculations well,

or an emotionally tired person will not be able to undertake either physical

39

work or mental thinking very well. These different states show the

interconnection between our various types of energies.

Our energy is chemo-electric in nature, where proteins, enzymes and

other electrically sensitive chemicals produce and transfer electricity

through our neuro-system to make us move, feel and think.138

Our energy

links our cognitive and kinetic systems together as one interdependent

system something like the Chinese concept of Qi that governs our bodily,

mental and emotional disposition.139

Energy is a dynamic force that fuels all

our processes and like all energy behaves according to the first law of

thermodynamics where it can be stored, released, focused and drained

according to stimulation, demands, needs and distractions coming from the

environment and within our self.

Our physical energy is responsible for our kinesthetic movements.

However, like nutrients, rest and training; our emotional energy also effects

our levels of physical energy. Take for example an athlete overly nervous

before a race, feeling ‘butterflies in the stomach’. With extreme anxiousness

and fear (presumably an under-confidence bias and anxiety), the athlete’s

physical energy will begin to drain making the person feel lethargic, tired

and weak. This contrasts with the athlete who is ready to do their best,

focused and determined to perform well and ready for the challenge without

allowing doubts and anxiousness to drain his or her energy. Another

example is the inability to reason logically when one is in a state of anger

and the tiredness one feels after being angry.

Emotional energy helps a person deal with everyday frustrations,

conflict and pressure. Our emotional energy is influenced by the

surrounding environment, people, objects and events. Emotions in the form

of moods ebb and flow during the day, week, and month.140

We are mostly

unaware of our moods which tend to influence the way we think about

things141

. Other emotions are triggered by a potential crisis, a crisis, our

health, our concern for something or general stress. A person with a high

level of emotional energy will be able to cope with the normal stresses of

the day while a person with a low level of emotional energy will quickly

succumb to any crisis, becoming stressed, anxious and/or frustrated very

quickly. Under such situations a person losses focus, where their attention

becomes diverted on other tasks that lower general energy levels.

Emotional energy is a source of determination providing a person with

the emotional motivation to get on with a job whether it is physical or

mentally orientated. Emotional energy provides our enthusiasm, drive and

resilience to do things. This is fine in a person who has a clear mission to

attend to, but where a person’s emotions are deluded with paranoia,

compulsiveness, depression, or other forms of neurosis, their emotional

energies are diverted into the fantasies these various pathologies might

generate142

. For example, a paranoid person will spend all their emotional

40

and mental energies on suspecting conspiracies against them, leaving little

energy available for creative or other problem solving issues facing them.

These types of emotions lead to immense fatigue and inability to function

logically. Emotional balance is very important so that both our physical and

mental capacities are at their optimum.

Mental energy is very important for creativity and supports two types of

cognitive operations. The first is the ability to make mental calculations and

draw inferences from logical and spatial relationships. The second is the

ability to make judgments, recognize similarities across different categories

of information using induction and logical reasoning.143

We tend to slow

down in the ability to make quick and accurate mental calculations during

aging but on the contrary improve in our induction and logical reasoning

with age. Mental energy is created through our interest, desire, curiosity,

passion and concern for something. Our mental energy levels can be

affected by drugs, food, sleep deprivation and various levels of health.144

The tension between a person’s current identity and future aspirations

manifests as dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction potentially creates the

energy and drive needed for action by an entrepreneur.145

The emotions

connected with dissatisfaction create a form of cognitive dissonance about

the current situation and a desired future outcome, thus channeling energy

and creating drive. It is an intensively emotional rather than rational

experience that creates the physical, emotional and psychic energy that are

required in new venture start ups and the pursuit of opportunity.

10. Intelligence

There is no conclusive agreement about what the concept of intelligence

really is. Some concepts of intelligence focused upon achievement, i.e., how

much a person really knows relative to others in an age group, or aptitude

orientated, i.e., the person’s ability to learn.146

Traditionally intelligence has

been considered as a general trait “g” where people would differ in the

level they possess. However as separate abilities (e.g. verbal, memory,

perceptual, and arithmetic) were recognized as intelligence, the concept of

intelligence widened.147

Howard Gardner took an interest in Norman Geschwind’s research

concerning what happens to normal or gifted individuals after the

misfortune of a stroke or some other form of brain damage. Gardner was

amazed at how a patient, counter to logic would lose the ability to read

words, but could still read numbers, name objects, and write normally.148

This suggested that different aspects of intelligence originate from different

parts of the brain.

41

Gardner synthesized his knowledge of the study of brain damage with

his study of cognitive development and believed that peoples’ endeavors

were not based upon any single type of intelligence, but rather a mix of

different intelligences. Intelligence needs to be applied in various ways for

survival in different environments and thus the abilities of a banker, medical

doctor, and Eskimo looking for fish are situational specific, all requiring

high levels of competence. Western society heavily values verbal,

mathematical, and spatial competencies while other competencies may be

more important in other cultures. Intellectual competence must therefore

entail the possession of a set of skills that can enable someone to solve

problems, resolve difficulties they may find in day to day living, have the

potential to find problems, and have the ability to acquire new knowledge

from their personal experiences.149

Every form of intelligence can be seen

as a specific paradigm having its own symbols and logic that will define,

enable evaluation, and solve problems.

Gardner hypothesized the multiple intelligence theory in recognition that

broad mental abilities are needed in society and that every person has a

unique blend of different intelligences.150

Gardner initially listed seven

types of intelligence, body-kinesthetic, verbal-linguistic, logical-

mathematical, visual-spatial, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal

intelligence. Gardner also affirmed that our separate types of intelligences

may not just be limited to the seven above and that others may also exist.

Brilliance and achievement most often depend upon the individual finding

the right vocation in life that suits their intelligence mix.

One of the other forms of intelligence that Gardner speculated about was

spiritual intelligence. Zohar and Marshall postulated that spiritual

intelligence is a moral base enabling us to question issues of ‘what’ and

‘why’ about things, and whether we should or shouldn’t be involved in

particular activities.151

Unlike general intelligence which is logical and

rational, spiritual intelligence enables us to question, which is central to the

concept of creativity.

Expanding upon Gardner’s concept of interpersonal intelligence is the

concept of emotional intelligence (EQ), which has become very popular

over the last two decades. Emotional intelligence places emphasis on a

number of characteristics that are important for creativity within a group or

social setting.152

However emotional intelligence may have a dark side. Some individuals

are able to utilize only the perception traits of emotional intelligence

without feeling the emotions of sympathy, compassion, and altruism. They

are better able to manage and manipulate others emotions better than their

own.153

This ability to manipulate and deceive others, albeit creatively, has

been dubbed Machiavellian Intelligence by Andrew Whiten and Richard

42

Byrne.154

This appears a primal ability in humans as primates have been

observed manipulating groups in order to gain support and rank.155

Intelligence and creativity are very different. The narrower definition of

intelligence tends to be the basis of convergent thinking, while creativity is

about divergent thinking in this regard. Creativity is a much wider concept

than intelligence. Our creative style has very little to do with our general

intelligence.156

Our creativity has more to do with the particular

characteristics of our intelligence and thinking styles we rely upon (see

figure 5). Creativity relies upon imagination to assist us see patterns and

similarities between unrelated things through metaphor and analogy, etc.

Creativity occurs across our various intelligences, bringing them into

synergy.157

Original thinking is about making these connections.

Wisdom

(emotion &

experience)

Cognitive processing (creativity)

Multiple

Intelligences

Thinking Typologies

General

Intelligence

(Memory & I)

The basis of our skills and

abilities used alone or

supplement other thinking

typologies (our most primitive

type of thinking) – wider than

Gardner’s MI

Mainly developed academic

learning which creates formal

knowledge. This formal

knowledge can supplement

other thinking typologies as it is

fairly useless on its own. – left

hemisphere

Based on experience, awareness,

reflection, mixed emotion and

imagination, very intuitive based

thinking. Useful for strategic and

visionary thinking and solving

problems based on past patterns.

Can be and is influenced by G and

MI – more right hemisphere but

uses both

Frontal lobe and coordinated

right/left hemisphere thinking. Can

be greatly enhanced using specific

cognitive tools that can be learned.

Can be supplemented by other

thinking typologies. Heavy use

imagination/metaphor/symbolic.

Problem solving & creating new

ideas

Instinctive

Solution

Knowledge

Application

Co

nn

ect

ive

Flu

idit

y

Me

mo

ry

Em

oti

ve

Figure 5. The four major thinking typologies

Multiple intelligence recognizes that different skills originate from different

areas of the mind and offers a different insight into how we think. There are

multiple paths of perception and reasoning patterns. A single form of

intelligence restricts the very way a problem is seen, what data is useful,

how the data is organized and analyzed, and what alternatives are

acceptable. In addition, domain paradigms that the majority of people have

been trained within, can act as barriers to breakthroughs and this is often

why a person from outside a domain may have an advantage. Prior

knowledge can be restrictive and anchor one to existing assumptions and

beliefs that prevail within the domain. This is why prodigious performance

is much more likely in fields where prior knowledge is not so important like

43

chess, music, and mathematics, than in fields that require extensive

knowledge like medicine, biotechnology, and nano-electronics, etc. Some

entrepreneurs are able to successfully enter new domains without any

formal training because they are not restricted by the patterned thinking of

the relevant disciplines to the industry.158

The ability to change thinking

paradigms is a pathway to creativity.

If we view intelligence as a wide concept and focus upon the outcomes

then intelligence becomes cultural, geographic, time-bound, and a

situational and contextual process rather than a trait.159

Therefore it’s not

intelligence itself that is important, but how knowledge is processed and

what is done with it. Recent research into children with learning disabilities

indicates that it is the capacity of the working memory, i.e., the capacity to

store and manipulate information and domain related knowledge, is more

important than IQ in academic attainment.160

However social bounding restricts acceptance of what is original and

what is not. For example whether Yoko Ono’s avant-garde art expression is

considered original depends upon her peers. The Royal Society overlooked

Edmund Stone’s discovery that willow bark relieved fever, leading to the

discovery of aspirin.

The consequences of something new may not be seen for many years. It

took more than a decade for the value of powered flight to be realized, as it

was only when a need for spotting on the battlefield emerged during the

Great War that led to rapid development of the aircraft industry. While the

development of the automobile industry was restricted in England with laws

requiring a man with a flag to walk in front of any automobile on the road,

the European industry grew rapidly and flourished without these social and

legal restrictions.

Although the cognitive processes of creative thinking may not change,

the knowledge, surrounding culture and applications will. Thinking is

usually based upon historical precedent and thereby path dependent,

focused upon solving contemporary problems. Over time the paradigms,

values and ethical orientations we think within will change. Thinking tends

to be dominated by major themes and contemporary issues (societal

patterning) of the time such as centralization and mechanization in the

1950’s, technology in the 1960’s, low cost labor intensive manufacturing in

the 1970’s, capital intensiveness of the 1980s, globalism of the 1990’s,

sustainability in the 2000’s, and localization over the last decade.

Economists, medical doctors, psychologists, scientists, and managers are

bounded to the current thinking of their respective fields, anchored to the

current values and philosophies (domain patterning). Organizational

thought is often restricted through the assembling of ‘like minded’ people

sharing the same beliefs and values where differing opinions may be subtly

suppressed (organizational patterning).

44

The tacit influence of political correctness is intrinsic censorship that is

much more powerful that formal means of censorship ensuring compliance

to the beliefs and values of the time and place. What we read, study, and

learn most often dominates our thoughts locking us into existing flows of

ideas, anchoring our thoughts to the current ‘realities’ that society defines

as ‘truths’. Peer and group acceptance is a very important personal need

which may inhibit the expression of ideas unacceptable to the group.

11. Towards the Concept of Creative Intelligence

To be creative in the social arena, a person should have a high level of

emotional and spiritual intelligence.161

Sternberg mentioned the concept of

practical intelligence which is necessary for a person to adapt, shape and

make selections in everyday life in order to cope with everyday issues and

problems.162

Practical intelligence is thus a measure of tacit knowledge,

where tacit knowledge is what is needed to survive and be successful in a

given environment.163

In the same article Sternberg mentioned the concept of creative

intelligence. This concept is also mentioned by a number of other authors,

although the term is used broadly and there is little consensus upon what it

really constitutes. Creative intelligence is a term grouping together the

cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of creative generation like intense

interest, motivation and other social influences,164

or a term that refers more

to styles of creative thinking.165,166

So both concepts of creative intelligence widen the concept of creativity

by placing importance on the contextual and environmental variables on one

hand and on thinking processes, applications, or styles on the other. Rowe

outlines four styles of creative intelligence;

• Intuition which is based on past experience to guide action,

• Innovation which concentrates on systematic and data orientated

problem solving,

• Imagination which uses visualization to create opportunities, and

• Inspiration, which emotionally focuses on the changing of something.167

Khandwalla focuses on a number of personal characteristics like

sensitivity, problem restructuring ability, fluency, flexibility, guessing

ability, originality, elaboration and the uses of various thinking processes

that support them, e.g., convergent thinking, problem restructuring, and

elaboration, etc.168

These approaches show that creativity is both influenced

by the environment and thinking processes employed.

45

In such a context creativity can be broadly considered an ability, or an

intelligence in its own right. A metaphorical construct of creative

intelligence would look something like Figure 6. A person is surrounded by

their social environment. The social environment stimulates an individual’s

perceptions, socializes beliefs and makes judgments upon creative efforts.

The family, domicile outlook, generational influence, age, education, work

and life experiences, etc, all have some influence on interest and motivation,

which should skew an individual toward interests and passions like art,

teaching, engineering, science, home duties, sports, etc.

The environment is completed by the field where contemporaries and

peers within it ultimately make social decisions about what is creative and

what is not. For example the art community decides what art is outstanding

and what art is mediocre. These judgments may only occur years after the

object of art was created, as it may take an artist many years to become

recognized. Although Vincent van Gogh painted most of his life, it wasn’t

until the end of his life that he became known. It was only after his death

that his vivid post-impressionist paintings were fully appreciated. Likewise,

peers in each science through journals and conferences decide what new

information to the domain is acceptable or unacceptable. The work of

Alfred Wagner on Polar air circulation and his hypothesis about the jet

stream and continental drift was not widely accepted until 20 years after his

death. A new product or fad may be considered something creative during

‘the fad period’, where the product’s creative edge disappears afterwards.

Products like the hula-hoop, Frisbee, virtual pets, lava lamps, pet rocks,

cabbage patch kids, and Pokémon rose in popularity quickly and eventually

declined. This fad phenomenon can be seen in many widely disused

management philosophies like management by objectives (MBO), matrix

management, one-minute management, and business process reengineering,

etc.

46

New Ideas

Unknown Opportunities

Developing Strategies

Solving Problems Surrounding

Environment

“Domain” &“Field”

Environmental

Factors conducive

to creativity

Environmental

Factors that

hinder creativity

Motivational

Trigger

Internal Influencing

Factors

Focus & Attention

Creative

Sensitivity

Energy

Emotion

Curiosity

Empathy

Confidence

Discipline

Interest

Passion

Prior

Knowledge

Perception

Patterning

Patterned Thinking

Processes

Creative Product

Applied Thinking

Tools,

Manifestations &

Elaborations Domain & Field

Acceptance/

Rejection

Memory

Heuristics

Belief

Imagination

Fantasy

Experience

Tacit Knowledge

Aw

are

ne

ss

Source of

intelligence &

Thinking

Processes

(Self Organizing

System)

Figure 6. A Metaphoric Construct of “Creative Intelligence”

Within the field of entrepreneurship four types of situations require creative

intelligence. These are the quest for new ideas, the search for yet unknown

opportunities, the development of strategies to exploit potential

opportunities and solving a multitude of problems that face individuals

through the life of the venture. Within the gambit of ethical strategy and

behavior creative intelligence is paramount to being able to implement

ethical principles into complex and ambiguous situations.

Our perception of the outside world is greatly dependent upon our

patterning, heuristics, other biases, and prior knowledge. What we notice or

don’t notice depends upon our creative sensitivity, focus and attention.

What we are interested in, have passion for and confidence in, all influence

47

our perception of people, objects and events. Our perception and reaction to

external stimuli and how our cognitive system will process incoming data

depends upon the existing psychic tension and developed cognitive

dissonance. If there is tension between ‘where we are’ and ‘what we

envisage, desire or aspire’, attention and energy will be drawn into the

following cognitive processes.

Our cognitive operations are independent from the external environment

and our consciousness. All cognitive processes are the result of changing

neural and receptor interactions that occur within different parts of the

brain. Information within the brain is distributed in a decentralized

configuration, functioning as a whole through a strategy called assembly

coding.169

This is a very flexible coding strategy as it can reorganize and

recombine information in a numerous number of ways. Through this

mechanism we are able to continually make perceptions in an ever changing

world.170

Our perceptions, reasoning, concept of self are not concentrated on one

part of the brain, as the brain is a decentralized processor. The brain is a self

organizing system which coordinates these functions. There is no centre of

convergence. Therefore the brain is a decentralized system that utilizes

information in different locations to produce our perceptions, thoughts,

reasoning and intuition. Cognitive processes are not serial, but operate in

parallel, reciprocal and distributed interaction.171

For example when we see

an object and touch it, our sight and tactile preceptors make independent

contributions to the identification of the object – the brain utilizes multiple

strategies to achieve this. There is thus no single locus or point for the

identification of objects. The representations of objects are made up of

spatial-temporal patterns of distributed neural activity.172

The way information is organized is of paramount importance to how

we see things and in solving a problem. As the brain processes in parallel

and can recombine information in numerous ways, this assists an individual

develop new thoughts, new ideas and to solve problems. Making analogies

is a matter of comparing two different concepts that share some similarity in

parallel. The creative process goes through a number of steps, which relies

on the mind as a self organizing system to restructure information and make

new associations, enabling problems to be solved. This usually occurs

during a period of incubation which because of the need to reorganize

information could be one of the most important aspects of seeing new

associations and finding solutions to problems.

Rather than rely on our raw natural thinking processes, we can utilize

disciplined and controlled thinking styles and tools that channel our

thinking processes for enhancing creative thought.173

These tools can assist

us to look at situations and problems in different ways so we can see new

48

associations and linkages which may lead to new ideas or solutions to

problems.

So broadly speaking a metaphoric concept of creative intelligence is

made up of our environment, the factors and variables that influence our

perceptions and cognitive thinking processes, a motivational trigger, our

prior knowledge, our thinking styles, tools that we can employ to enhance

creativity, and the product of the process itself, which will be accepted or

rejected as being something creative. If this model is representative of what

creative intelligence is, then by manipulating the environmental parameters,

being aware of our emotions and other influences upon our perception and

thinking, and by developing new thinking styles through the use of thinking

tools we can enhance our creative ability.

12. Awareness

The environment is full of inconsistencies, discontinuities and disparities

concerning objects, people and events in life. Our association with the

environment is a complex one. It is full of peculiarities and subtleties of

meaning, if we are sensitive enough to pick them up. Awareness is related

to our ability to perceive and understand the complex content rich

environment. A high awareness level implies that we are more observant

and alert about situations around us and feel comfortable with the

complexity rather than exerting a great effort in trying to simplify

meaning.174

People who can perceive the rich layers of content of the

environment have higher levels of creative sensitivity and should therefore

be able to pick up associations between seemingly random facts and

information. They will be better placed to make connections than someone

who is less sensitive to the environment.

Awareness is linked but not dependent upon our intelligence. Without

awareness our intelligence would not function optimally. In order to solve

problems it is necessary to be able to perceive them. Therefore awareness

plays a role in cognitive processing where intelligence may play an enabling

role; especially if we view intelligence as the ability to perceive, recall, and

process information spatially, linguistically, musically, and kinesthetically,

etc. Within the creativity mode, the brain partly relies on external stimuli to

act as cues to assist in long term memory recall. Awareness and attention

assists in picking up these subtle cues which will aid in the recall of

experience and information manifested as prior knowledge, deeply locked

away in the long term memory,175

aiding associative processes and

imagination. This is not a uniform characteristic within the population and

some people are more endowed than others. Therefore people with low

awareness would not pick up as much stimuli from the environment as

49

someone with high awareness, which will result in a lower number of cues

to stimulate recall from the long term memory. Research also indicates that

our perception of the environment may be culturally influenced. Miyamoto

et. al. found that Americans tend to view scenes context independently,

while East Asians are more context dependent upon the way they view

scenes.176

Our level of awareness is related to various groups of emotions that may

influence our perception and thought processes, and thus organization of

information.177

Emotions play a major part in developing our self concept

“I” and “me” with different sets of emotions are related to different levels

of awareness.

At our primal level we are concerned about our basic physiological

needs. Our awareness is physical and immediate, concerned about now.

Associated with our primal self are the basic emotions concerned about

survival, physical fulfillment and enjoyment. The material level is

concerned with pleasure, comfort, and the avoidance of pain. The

boundaries of a person are metaphorically extended by the things we own.

The social self is very much based in feelings of one’s position in relation to

others. Empathy exists at this level and our emotions are concerned with

belongingness. The ego self is the most common domain where we are

concerned about ‘how we see ourselves’ and ‘how others see us’. The ego

self is about glorifying ourselves. This level of awareness leads to very

sophisticated coping mechanisms to deal with realities that don’t fit in with

our world view. The spiritual self enables us to attach different sets of

values to “I’ and “me”, where people begin to feel integrated with the

world around them. At this level self esteem comes from doing what a

person feels is right, and where a person may be willing to sacrifice their

interests for the interests of something greater than themselves. At this

higher level people can transcend their basic emotions of excitement, fear,

anger, and anxiety, and will be aware of their defense mechanisms that

operate at the ego level.

One is immersed within their own sea of emotional orientation with

each level of awareness differently influencing perception and thought.

Within the lower continuums people’s streams of thought tend to be

negatively based where fear manifests itself in worry, anger, judgment, and

general anxiety, leading to generally pessimistic narrative. At the spiritual

level there is little negative narrative on the part of the person.178

Geshe Tashi Tsering postulated that every feeling whether good or bad,

powerful or light should be paid attention to through mindfulness179

that can

be used as a force to protect the psych.180

This has two important

implications. The first is to be aware of our own biases and distortive

tendencies in our perception of objects. The second implication is that we

protect ourselves from harmful influences and ‘emotionally’ learn. Research

50

has shown that mindfulness can activate the ‘default network’.181

The

‘default network’ is active when an individual is at rest, not engaged in

deliberating thoughts, and shuts down when an individual becomes active

and focused on the outside world.

Emotions dominate our deep intrinsic abilities like attention, alertness,

interpersonal abilities, creativity, propensity for action, and strategic

outlook, etc., shape our view of the world, and influences our intentions,

and actions. This approach in explaining behavior is probably better than

previous schools of entrepreneurial thought.182,183

For example, people

through history like Gandhi, Churchill, Stalin, and Hitler were dominated

by their emotions of concern, compassion, destiny, legacy, ruthlessness,

revenge, Machiavellianism, hate, fear, and insecurity respectively. Emotions

greatly influence peoples’ sense of self efficacy which infers that thinking is

heavily influenced by life experience, time and place, and the levels of

awareness they are attuned to.

Awareness can be selective and may give a person some heightened

sensitivity to some aspect of their life. There may be more awareness in

some areas than others, such as increased sensitivity to color, pictures,

sounds, music, values and ethics, human behavior, empathy, spiritual and

spatial dimensions, etc.184

People’s sensitivity also ebbs and wanes during

the day, month and different times in a person’s life.185

At mean levels of

awareness, a person will tend to perceive more in their area of sensitivity

endowment and experience subtle satisfactions or disappointments

concerning certain pieces of art, music, performance, etc. Pleasant

appreciations can lead to increased vigor and energy in a person’s area of

sensitivity. This leads a person to better intuition in their particular areas of

sensitivity. However, too much sensitivity on the other hand can lead a

person to suffer pain, as nothing will satisfy their expectations. This can

lead to deep emotions, i.e., feeling sorry for employees, pain for the poor,

and in the extreme, feelings of depression and lethargic states, mooting

them as ineffective people.

Awareness assists a person develop a deeper understanding within their

domain of sensitivity than what the average individual would. Consequently

a sensitive person becomes aware and concerned about what is wrong

within their area of sensitivity. This is where creativity begins, with the

finding of a problem. Only after sensing that there is a problem can a person

put their attention to solving the problem. Creative people focus on what is

wrong, out of place, missing, not complete, lacking something, knowing

that something needs to be changed for the better. Problem solving is not

the centre of creativity and not the process that actually creates the

opportunity. It is the finding of the problem and the way a person mentally

structures it that creates the birth of a potential opportunity and original

thinking.

51

13. Entrepreneurial opportunity and developing ideas

At the cognitive level our mind is full of mental imagery and other forms of

information stored in our memory in the form of schemata. Our schema

play a paramount role in our beliefs, values, and how we make sense of the

world, influencing the way we think about things and make decisions.186

Schemata provide a cognitive structure where algorithm-like sequences

assist the individual understand events and situations.187

Schemata also

enable an individual construct scenes or vignettes in our mind,188

which

manifest our thoughts, desires, and fantasies. Generally our schemata

maintain the rigidity of our belief systems,189

which enables the individual

to maintain their inspirational and behavioral trajectories forming the

informational basis of our thinking and decision making.190,191

Our schemata

forms the basis of what could be called our dominant logic (or what the

author likes to call dominant narrative), that encapsulates our identity.192

When new information is perceived, it may conflict with our existing

dominant logic. This could arise from any number of displacements like the

unexpected dropping of a set of keys onto the ground, or a much more

drastic event like the loss of a job or death in the family. Shocks or

displacements bring attention to a state of disequilibrium where the

dominant logic is challenged. If these challenges are not suppressed or

denied by our defense mechanisms, an individual may be able to think of

and develop solutions to these discontinuities to bring back stability193

and

view alternative courses of action.194

These shocks will be accompanied

with either positive or negative emotions which may generally influence the

trajectories we take.195

Shock or displacement may lead to a situation where the individual

doesn’t know how to respond and begins to use effectuation to handle the

situation, thereby making connections and constructions out of different

pieces of information the person has available within their memory at the

time. Existing schemata will integrate the person’s knowledge into the new

thought vectors which brings congruency in thoughts and judgment.196

After

a period of confusion these thoughts after some re-assessment begin to form

a catharsis, which may lead to seeing new ideas.

Concepts are the building blocks of ideas, very general abstract notions

that can be built into specific ideas. Concepts are built upon images and

perceptions. They tend to have vague and descriptive meanings, rather than

actionable notions. Concepts are descriptive views of something in the

environment that exist, or something from the imagination that exists only

in fantasy. These may not necessarily be in the form of language, but may

be images, symbols, spatial visages, or musical themes, etc. One or more

conceptualizations will usually be combined together to form an idea, which

52

can be refined, developed, enlarged, and elaborated upon to form something

that can be acted upon.

A description of a restaurant is a concept that provides a list of

characteristics with little actionable meaning. Mexican food is another

concept that is also descriptive of something, but when they are combined

together they become a Mexican restaurant which becomes an idea that can

be elaborated upon, expanded, refined, developed, and action taken.

Likewise the concept of a theatre company and the concept of a restaurant

can be combined together to form a theatre restaurant. In Melbourne,

Australia, the concept of a tram running around the city was combined with

the concept of a restaurant to form the Colonial Tramway Restaurant.197

The

first airplane, the Wright Flyer 1 was invented from a number of concepts

including the basic concepts of aerodynamics (thrust, drag, lift, and gravity),

the box kite, and a petrol engine powering a propeller to create thrust,

balance, and stability. In each case individual concepts were observed,

considered, assembled, synergized, and tested, to make a complete form.

These emerging concepts must develop a critical mass of thought that

connects snippets of information that merge into meaning that both the

thinker and society can share. Entrepreneurial opportunities may be

developed through effectuative imagination (thought experiments), and

invention by experimental engineering.

Concepts can be formed from information where ideas can be developed

by fusing the different pieces together. For example:

Information (1): the population in many developed countries is aging.

Information (2): As there are less people at study age, universities are

developing excess capacity.

Information (3): Universities are subject to funding cuts.

Information (4): Many developing countries have young populations at

study age who wish to gain an education.

These threads of information can be developed into the idea of taking

foreign fee paying students into developed country universities that have

excess capacity. Similarly,

Information (1): the costs of running a service department in a firm within a

developed country are very high.

Information (2): Operational costs in countries like India are much lower.

Information (3): Countries like India have abundant and highly educated

people, who speak English very well.

Information (4): Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) allows direct and

cheap communication around the world.

53

Therefore this information can be developed into the idea of a customer

service centre located in Mumbai to service customers over the phone in the

United States.

Each concept is situational to a particular time and place, as words,

images, objects, signs and symbols. The individual concepts must be

arranged in a manner that creates some form of shared and valued meaning.

Narrative is a store and carrier of knowledge, particularly within social

contexts. An idea becomes a narrative of meaning which members of the

community can embrace and benefit from the revelation of another’s

imagination.198

Narrative conveys ideas through conversation, action, and

symbols to others who in turn become able to share experiences and

perceptions through the same stories. The new narrative must trigger

peoples’ memory199

and transplant an appreciation them into the story200

that inserts emotion which plays a major role in creating these

associations.201

The process of developing a narrative is critical to creating a

new idea and the identity of the idea is critical to the legitimacy it receives

from stakeholders.202

Narrative, symbols, and images of successful ideas

become embedded within our social knowledge structure. Social change can

be seen as new themes running through the community that binds people

through common perceptions and tacit agreement.

Developing concepts into ideas is very much a learning process that

creates a linkage or nexus between real world experiences and the

conceptual world of how we see the world ought to be. The first step of this

process is to identify concepts. An idea that can’t be physically tested may

be developed through the socio-cognitive process of ‘talking through’ the

issues as a means of thinking and articulating them to create clarity203

-

developing an idea as a narrative. An invention can be tested in the real

world, crafting concrete experiences and then reflecting upon the outcomes.

Unsatisfactory results will trigger further reflection and another round of

experimentation, refining the idea further. This process may continue a

number of times until ideas are refined. If after continued experimentation

the results are still not satisfactory, then a complete evaluation seeking

further information may be required before further testing and

experimentation. Eventually new divergent knowledge is created. This

process of trial and error is how Orville and Wilbur Wright learned how to

build a powered airplane and fly it. This learning process is seen on the left

hand side of figure 7. This is also the way many entrepreneurial ideas are

constructed.

Individuals develop knowledge and wisdom through the learning

process.204

Some people will learn better through actively testing their ideas

in the real world, while others learn better through reflection upon the

different attributes of their experience and ideas. Some people’s learning

styles may be more suited to different challenges through the

54

entrepreneurial process during venture development.205

According to Ward

people have their own preferred ways of learning where each cognitive

approach to learning will utilize emphasize different types of information in

developing idea constructs.206

Images and

Connections

Concepts

Ideas

Opportunity

Vision Platform - Perception

Time & Space Potential

Concept Generator –

Making Connections

Sources of Opportunity Learning:

Conceptual World

Identifying

concepts

Evaluation after

experience

Complete re-

evaluation (seek

further

information)

Real World

Experimentation

& Testing

Structure common to all

opportunities

Vision – Outcomes

Time & Space

Resources

Networks

Skills, Competencies & Capabilities

Competitive Environment

Strategy – scope & depth

“A Narrative”

Evaluated and

Elaborated Upon

Figure 7. The opportunity creation process

Some people may prefer the method of assimilation and grasp experience

by thinking and theorizing, then transforming the information by watching

and reflecting. Assimilators conceptualize in abstract and undertake

55

reflective observation. People with assimilative learning preferences will

tend to stew over potential solutions to problems and directions to take.207

Assimilators are excellent at pulling together disparate observations and

building these separate information strands into coherent ideas.208

In their

ideas, assimilators will tend to be logically precise putting more emphasis

on the theory behind the concept than the practical side.

The converger grasps by thinking and theorizing and then transforming

the information by doing and applying. Convergers rely on abstract

conceptualization and experimentation. While convergers may not be doing

something all the time, they never stop thinking about problems and their

solutions.209

They will build up their technical knowledge and platform,

ready to utilize it on developing solution and products once they understand

all the issues involved.210

They tend to be more technical rather than

socially orientated.211

The diverger grasps by feeling and doing and then transforms the

information by watching and reflecting. Divergers have the opposite

strengths to convergers. They have a strong imagination and ability to read

people and situations through their social awareness abilities. They are able

to look at situations from many perspectives and organize many

interrelationships into a meaningful gestalt. They are strong at evaluating

concepts through the market, financial, and operational issues, etc., through

rich personal networks they build up.212

The accommodator grasps experience by feeling and doing and then

transforms the information by doing and applying. Accommodators tend to

have the opposite strengths to assimilators. Accommodators prefer concrete

experiences and active experimentation. They prefer to do rather than to

theorize. They are opportunity seeking and like to act rather than spend a

long period of time evaluating the opportunity. They are able to implement

plans extremely well and their strength is towards opportunity exploitation.

Robinson and Rose postulated that we tend to learn from personal

disturbances which bring chaos and then allow us let go of existing

knowledge to replace it with new knowledge.213

This is consistent with the

entrepreneurial process where a trigger like losing a job or seeing a shop

vacant for rent may launch a person onto taking new trajectories like

pursuing an opportunity.214

Robinson and Rose postulated that emotional

awareness will facilitate the transition from disturbance to chaos in order to

begin critical reflection to facilitate the transition to ‘letting go’ of past

beliefs, to enable the learning of new knowledge. This process involves

synthesis in thinking rather than linear thinking and is a deep emotional

experience.215

Learning can be hindered or distorted by a number of cognitive

mechanisms.216

For example many entrepreneurs are flawed in their

thinking due to the use of small samples, and display overconfidence in

56

their abilities when evaluating opportunities. Other cognitive biases such as

‘obstacle thinking’ leads an individual to focus on the negative aspects of an

opportunity, providing reasons for giving up and abandoning an idea.217

People have cognitive structures that limit their field of vision allowing

only selective perception and interpretation.218

This plays an important role

in what people become interested in and what they see in the environment

and behave in response.219

Individuals are steered by their dominant logic

which acts as a lens through which they view the environment and see

emerging opportunities.220

These interpretive schemata act as mindsets or

mental maps that create a particular world view for any individual.221

Thus

dominant logic makes a person’s perception and responses unique.

According to March the commitment brought through a person’s dominant

logic is more important in action than a person’s thoughtfulness,222

thus

motivation, drive, and passion are central to the development of ideas.

Evolving ideas become a personal narrative of the entrepreneur, a

conceptual framework with a motivated objective. The idea is attached to

excitement and a set of other emotions becoming the individual’s gestalt, ‘a

theory of success,’ or a new mantra for the future. Narrative becomes

absorbed within the person becoming a source of drive and momentum.223

New narratives call the present into question, replacing it with an alternative

future. Through narrative, ambiguity is eliminated and replaced with a clear

and guiding path of action, a new trajectory which becomes the new

meaning for the entrepreneur and venture, exerting influence on those

involved to accomplish it.224

New narratives are introduced into society

where they are tried, some rejected, and some accepted, emerging as a

shared meaning to all. As we see, many narratives are archetypal with

common structures, allusions, and metaphors to convey to society through

public discourse by our corporations today. We can see common themes of

responsibility, transparency, sustainability, accountability, and caring, etc.

Entrepreneurs develop their ideas from personal rather than abstract

perspectives where possibilities are explored within their own personal

constructs and constraints.225

With a map of the future by which to navigate,

the vision is set out so the idea can take on a framework where structure can

be added by assembling skills, competencies, organizational capabilities,

and resources together, and identifying which parts of the entrepreneur’s

networks are required, or what new networks need to be created, and what

action is required within the competitive environment through a formulated

strategy. Once an idea has structure the process of action can commence.

The assembly of various components to enact an idea into action and

reality requires retrospective reasoning to assemble all the components

through our strategic imagination. This process may take a long period of

time to develop into something that action can be taken upon and may even

continue after the entrepreneurial start-up is in operation. This is not any

57

predictable staged or linear process and it is haphazard and something

unique to each individual.

The narrative that the entrepreneur develops about any opportunity

provides insight into his or her future effectiveness.226

How the opportunity

is described, what histories, analogies, and metaphors used will provide

insight into the meaning and commitment towards the opportunity. There is

nothing mysterious about creating ideas, it is a ‘mind-flow’ of thought that

eventually reaches a critical mass and through rearrangement and

recombination the resulting narrative becomes the basis for action. Some

ideas drift away while others continue to be built upon like Darwin’s

concept of ‘natural selection’ and the Orville and Wilbur Wright’s quest for

powered flight. There is rarely any eureka moment, although insights are

gained along the way, as most ideas travel along a slow path of

development, which on the whole maybe mundane and boring to most.227

This eventually leads to the construction of new knowledge that develops

into the narrative of a new invention, idea, opportunity, or venture. Within

the process of effectuation, some narratives are picked up and others

dropped as ideas develop and are refined.

From the entrepreneurship perspective, an opportunity can be

constructed from the imagination where products, themes, and brands create

a story of new experience. Alternately there maybe the discovery of a

potential incongruence where perceived latent demand exists in which case

the primary narrative will be aimed at satisfying these perceived needs.228

As this process emerges our ideas manifest as stories, new opportunities and

ideas are very much a socially constructed process where the outcomes

develop new knowledge which provides new shared meanings.229

The

narrative of new ideas, entrepreneurial opportunity, and invention is about

‘what might be’ and ‘how the world might look and act’ as they are created

and developed.230

Imagination and the resulting stories are turned from

fantasy and fiction into reality.

14. Creative Intelligence and Ethics

At the beginning of this paper a number of impending issues and potential

crises were listed. These relate to the environment, ecology, climate,

poverty, economy, mega-cities, education, racism, hate, rising food prices

and the like. All these issues and problems mentioned are ethical problems,

or at least have major ethical components. The complexity of most of these

issues is so overwhelming that people give up and stay with the present

situation, even knowing that less than optimum utilities exist and potential

disaster may be imminent. Solutions for various reasons are too hard, such

as the difficulty in getting common agreement and consensus. Many

58

solutions require massive changes in habits which are not acceptable to

people. So the action taken is to defer taking action. The solutions for many

of our problems today are yet to be thought out.

In addition, there seem to be a lot of poor ethical decisions going on

around us. Companies still cheat on food ingredients, suspected carcinogens

are still used in a number of products, luxury goods still coming out of the

exploited sweatshops of Asia,231

company directors still withholding and

distorting information to shareholders through the way they present it,232

and stories about the egotistical, greed, fear, and self-preserving decisions

US financial institutions took during the 2008 crisis are becoming public

knowledge.233

There are no international agreements being made about the

issues that matter most to the Earth, leading to criticisms about the lack of

political leadership today. Political and corporate leadership is just as

confused today as political leaders were confused in Europe during 1938.

Leaders have learned to appease, just as Kyoto provided bidding time. The

world has not acted in unison for a long time, but rather acted in favor of

tribal interests, as everyone appears to be heading in their separate

directions.234

Society’s issues can be extremely complex, and often break down into a

host of other complex sub-issues that need consideration. For example

privatizing public utilities was popular during the 1980s as a means of

making government smaller, more efficient, and bringing fiscal windfalls to

budgets, something seen as a win-win situation through returning to the true

values of capitalism.235

However privatization brought questions about

medium term consequences which at the time were conveniently solved

through contractual agreements, i.e., who has the responsibility for

reinvestment in and maintaining quality in infrastructure.236

The long term

consequences of public utilities under control of unanswerable private

corporations are just only beginning to emerge today.237

Corporations are

laying down consumer by-laws without the public having recourse to

natural justice. Some corporations are so big that they can afford to flaunt

the law and pay the penalties as a means of meeting their objectives.238

The

ethics of any situation and subsequent actions taken don’t necessarily yield

predictable results. Courses of action are usually decided according to the

prevailing values and emotions of the times.239

Today’s issues and problems have so many factors and variables to

consider, non-linear approaches are required. Making decisions according to

guidelines, e.g., societal rules, current philosophical trends, leadership

visions, or various scholarly writings, run us into difficulties. Cause and

effect is ambiguous and the guidelines we use most often are conflicting and

lead to confusion, which won’t easily provide satisfactory outcomes. The

way we approach solving problems through incremental solutions influence

other factors that we cannot easily foresee. These issues may actually be

59

beyond our cognitive limits, and thus impossible to truly understand our

predicament as we are dealing on scales that humanity has never had to deal

with before. We are in the position of being ‘a lab-rat trying to understand

the technicians in white coats working in the laboratory’.

Unlike any previous time in history we have become separated from the

environment. We are living in the illusion that we can control the

environment through our knowledge and technology which has generated a

sense of disconnection, as we don’t see ourselves belonging to the World

we live in. With the use and reliance on oil and gas for energy, we have

developed a socio-economic, cultural, financial, and politico-military

construct that we are psychically locked within.240

Yesterday’s generals were actually on the battlefield while today’s

generals may not even be in the country were military action is taking place.

UAV drone technology is also turning the 21st century warrior into a “9 to

5” executive, detached from the warzone, who reports to work conducts

missions, fires at live targets, and goes home for dinner with the family, not

feeling a thing. Economists are not walking around society; they are

examining computerized simulations in a comfortable office, while

politicians are translating these “guess-theories” into politically acceptable

and appeasing remedies. The mythical grandeur we have created about our

own species is blocking the view. Our beliefs in ‘who and what we are’

create one large dysfunctional heuristic that is no more than humanistic

chauvinism, a species overconfidence bias that has encouraged us to believe

that because all things in the past have been solved then all things in the

future will also be solved.

We are being told by the ‘spiritual’ and ‘management’ gurus that new

paradigms are required in managing our affairs and enterprises. There are

plenty of ‘acclaimed’ and ‘best selling’ positivist and instrumentalist advice

about ‘the seven ways’ or ‘ten points’ that lead to success and enlightenment

that have become the vanguard of our contemporary social dogma. It is

‘politically correct’, ‘responsible’, and a way of ‘doing something for the

environment’ to recycle paper, switch off the lights over lunch, or maintain

the air conditioning at a slightly higher temperature to cut down on

electricity consumption. But are using bio-fuels and hybrid cars

environmentally ethical? Have we really thought about how

environmentally ethical these measures really are?241

Is environmental

appeasement enough, or do we really need a sustainable retreat, especially

when we don’t really understand the Earth as an eco-system. For example,

renewable energy appears a valid and benign option, but what would be the

effect of a massive number of turbines on the vortices within the

atmosphere?242

The increase in the planting of bio-fuel crops is accused by

many of putting upward pressure of food prices.243

Solving complex

problems requires wisdom and ingenuity.

60

When serious paradigm shifting solutions come to the table like E.F.

Schumacher’s ideas of how to organize our economy and society in a more

sustainable way,244

it becomes a trendy talking point, something nice,

attracting curiosity, espoused, but rejected in action because it means real

change in our comfortable habits which the majority won’t accept. We are a

compliant society.

The majority of businesses are started because of financial need or

perceived economic opportunities,245

and ethics are not usually a major

consideration in these nascent ventures. The usual primary objectives of an

entrepreneur are to survive, grow, make a profit, and/or maintain or build a

lifestyle.246

Ethics and profits can be seen as conflicting objectives, just as

cost and profit, individual verses society interest, knowing when to be

diplomatic verses being honest, personal loyalty verses responsibility for

what is right, and considering the short verses the long term.

These paradoxes are usually seen as being mutually exclusive, where

there is a need to select one or the other, not necessarily dispositions that

can go together. Thus this is the old paradigm challenge for ethics. Ethics

appears to be about making choices, between these types of alternatives.

Sound ethical choices require emotional awareness and consciousness about

the swaying influence any set of emotions may exert over our decisions. We

may have a sense of ethics but little idea about how to apply them in

situations of marginality and ambiguity, especially where we lack

knowledge and experience. Good ethical choices are about synergizing

thoughts and coming up with ideas where the consequences of

implementation are understood. Ethics requires creativity and wisdom to

implement decisions.

A strong sense of ethical code is not enough in a society with complex

problems. Ethics are generally subservient to our objectives and applied to

what we do in the absence of wisdom, i.e., foreseeing the potential

consequences of any action. Therefore action may lead to unsatisfactory

results through naivety, design or, the influence of psychotic afflictions.247

We live in a society of ethically compromising behavior. Internet

companies are using tracking cookies to mine data from our computers

about our internet habits.248

Microsoft use sophisticated tracking cookies to

profile our personal computers for unlicensed software without the user

knowing under the guise of software updates. While many would argue that

this is an invasion of privacy, Microsoft would argue that they are

safeguarding their intellectual property.249

Some multinational retailers are

designing their house brand packaging in ways that their products resemble

premium brands.250

Banks are regularly criticized for following minimum

legal requirements and undertaking predatory lending practices rather than

providing ethical customer service. Microcredit is seen by many as a

powerful way of alienating poverty. However studies have found that many

61

women are not emancipated by the loan, but actually put into more debt as

they don’t control the repayments.251

Interest rates are not low which often

leads to repayment difficulties. Many stories exist about agents causing

great community disruption and families being worse off than before the

loan.252

There appears to be a fine ethical line that is very ambiguous and

easy to cross without the public actually knowing about it.

Ethics is a relative concept to many corporations. What policies and

benchmarks Tesco, Nike, Apple, and Google practice in one country may be

different from what these same organizations practice in another country.

These decisions may be taken incrementally without deep thought or

intentionally, showing where the firm’s values really are. These values and

resulting behavior inhibit a corporation’s ability to be ethical – the paradox

of being principled or pragmatic.

The author in a previous paper postulated that ethics are part of our true

self.253

Cognitive research on the effect of brain damage to the prefrontal

cortex on moral judgment seems to confirm this. Our sense of morality

originates from the same place that our empathy and other higher order

emotions are generated. Studies have shown that although those with a

damaged prefrontal cortex are able to have an abstract ‘utilitarian’ moral

sense, they find great difficulty applying these abstract notions to real life

situations.254

It is our true self that possesses innate qualities that manifest as

humility, integrity, responsibility, compassion and forgiveness.255

These

qualities exist under the layers of our emotions and desires constructing our

identity which we know as “I’ or “me”. The “I” and “me” persona is the

false self that performs the role as a macro-defense mechanism maintaining

our survival and suppressing the innate qualities of our true self. If we can

escape the influence of our emotions, we begin through our innate empathy

developing an understanding of our self, others, and the environment.256

And this is where we can see connections that we have never seen before.

We are connected as one system and see the interrelationships and

interdependencies around us. We have a connection to the collective

unconscious, which Jung posed as a collection of information, including

myths, stories, images, universal symbols that are understood across all

cultures.257

And within this collective unconscious many philosophers

postulate that universal principles are common across cultures and

consistent through time.258

Traditional societies have endured in all sorts of conditions and those

that have followed ecological ethics have survived,259

while those that chose

to ignore and flaunt these ethics disappeared, becoming extinct

civilizations.260

Failed civilizations throughout human history have shown

the consequences of what we collectively do eventually will come back and

overwhelm society.261

Everything interrelates, where changes influence

62

other parts of the eco-system in ways that are difficult to determine in

advance. Deforestation in Africa has enabled malaria carrying mosquitoes

to breed in open sun-drenched land, where some people survive because of

the make-up of their blood.262

It’s human behavior which tips the eco-

system into directions that carry grave consequences for society.

Ethics are bounded by society’s values, culture, history, at the society

level, and personal values, experience and upbringing at the personal level.

As we have seen with the banking crisis, externally imposed ethics through

laws and regulations cannot foresee the ambiguity of interpretation. There

are always ways and means to get around law and regulation and many

industries are good at this. Ethics must be internalized within us like the

Freudian metaphor of the superego, keeping the id and ego in check. This is

why we pay our taxes, don’t speed and stop at red lights when there are no

other cars or pedestrians around, and return lost property to owners without

the need of a reward. In fact recent research has shown that being

considerate for others can actually reduce stress levels and improve our

health.263

This requires being aware of the influence of our negative

emotions, where few people have the ability recognize this. There can be no

ethics without an awareness of our emotions.

Applying ethics relies on utilizing our creative intelligence and the

processes are exactly the same as solving any problem or developing a new

idea. Seen this way ethics are an application of creativity. Through the

various forms of imagination described earlier in the paper, one will take

numerous issues and regional interests to evolve vision of a potential

solution. Imagination will assist a person run through numerous scenarios

each with different and unique value judgments and dilemmas, with

questions not easy to answer.

Paradoxes or contradictions usually block the way to a new future.

However new and innovative solutions can be found within the most

complex paradoxes. For example, US industry considered cost and quality

to be at different ends of the spectrum. A product of low quality could be

produced at a lower cost than a product of a higher quality. Thus cost and

quality were considered mutually exclusive. You either produced a product

for a low cost or you produced a product for quality at a higher cost. The

philosophy of Total Quality Management (TQM) changed the paradigm

postulating that cost and quality were not mutually exclusive and actually a

firm can reduce cost and improve quality at the same time.264

As we saw

with the abundance of literature on Japanese management in the 1980s, this

new paradigm came as a revelation to US managers.265

The ability to see

complementary relationships in opposing tendencies allows escape from the

‘zero-sum’ approaches to paradoxical problems. The ability to benefit from

these paradoxes is the concern for change people have within the situation.

Every organization and industry will have a set disposition for change and

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stability, which will define how paradox and change is approached.266

Potential new futures that change the rules of the game always create

opportunities within the status quo.

Ethical thinking takes place within the metaphorical model of creative

intelligence outlined earlier in this paper. Within our prior knowledge are

ethical schemata which stores concepts of integrity, responsibility,

compassion, forgiveness, generosity, courage, justice, self discipline, and

humility. These universal principles without lower level emotional

interference become the values by which we think, make decisions, and

behave. Our imagination and particularly empathy gives us the ability to

apply these concepts to everyday life. Higher awareness enables us to

understand our emotions behind our thoughts. Strong and unchecked

emotions can very easily suppress our ethical values. The awareness of our

emotions brings wisdom to intuition.

It is our experience and resulting wisdom that enables us to apply ethics

to problems. The most difficult aspect of ethical thinking is navigation

through various paradoxes mentioned above. Thus wisdom in the case of

ethics is the ability to apply personal principles into action. This

competence develops over time as applying ethics requires experience,

particularly in dealing with constraints and potential consequences that are

difficult to foresee. For this reason ethical solutions are artful rather than

something reasoned as feeling through empathy and maneuvering through

imagination is how solutions are constructed.

Ethical behavior is not a soft option. Ethics are not about the pursuit of

harmony. Ethics require the courage to say “no” rather than making

promises just to please people only to renege on that promise sometime in

the future, leading to a loss of integrity. Pleasing people is not necessarily

ethical behavior as it may be based on a psychotic sense of fear or feelings

of low self efficacy. Truth requires a certain amount of diplomacy so that

people may accept what they are being told. Telling the truth can be used as

a way to sadistically hurt people by those with narcissistic tendencies. Too

much compassion can lead to depression. Knowing that something is

harmful like smoking and doing nothing about it may be a sign of poor self

discipline and anxiety. As a consequence ethical behavior may sometimes

mean taking unpopular actions in conflict with personal values such as

going to war, raising taxes, or putting principle before loyalty, etc. Thus a

final ingredient of ethical thinking is will.

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15. Hindrances to Creativity and Original Thinking

The way we perceive and think is influenced by so many types of cognitive

traps that channel and bias our conclusions. Some of these cognitive traps

include;

• Defense mechanisms are psychological strategies that the psych

develops to cope with emotions generated through our everyday life.267

Defense mechanisms preserve a person’s self image and view of the world

that helps protect our psych from anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. Normality

often contains neurotic traits which can be triggered by anxiety and

dominate one’s perception over a period of high emotion. In such situations,

defense mechanisms can over compensate and develop distortions and

misrepresentations.268

• Culture, particularly restrictive cultures, can be seen as a massive

defensive mechanism against change, uncertainty, and chaos. Culture is a

mechanism that creates certainty and familiarity that acts as a safety barrier

through norms, values, and beliefs it supports, channeling attention to a

limited set of goals and actions.269

• Cognitive biases are errors of judgment based on misconceptions of the

facts, memory errors, probability errors, motivational factors and/or social

influences that lead to irrational reasoning.

• Complacency is a characteristic that gradually sets into a person who

becomes very comfortable, bored, and tired of the mundane work he or she

is doing. Past success tends to bring high self confidence in people, where

they are satisfied with their personal success and wish to ‘rest on their

laurels.’ Leaders believe that they know everything there is to know about

their industry and cease to scan the environment for threats and

opportunities, becoming ‘blind.’ Sometimes this overconfidence brings

arrogance. Within this scenario motivation will slowly decline and new

ideas, self discipline, general focus, and concentration will wane.

• Groupthink is where groups come to a consensus without really

critically analyzing all the various issues involved, with an objective of

striving for unanimity, overriding the motivation to objectively appraise

alternative courses of action.270

• Motivational biases are a group of mechanisms that influence perception

and decision making based upon what a person wants to see when a person

has an interest in reaching certain conclusions or things go a certain way.

• “False urgency” where an organization is busy undertaking tasks for

things that are not important to the firm’s progress or survival.271

Often

people undertake ‘pseudowork’ to look good; following rules rather striving

to achieve goals.272

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• “Heuristics” are ‘short-cuts’, ‘rules of thumb’ decision rules or

templates that aid quick decision making and are embedded within our

belief system, sometimes reflective of our deep motivations and social

conditioning. They are intertwined with our knowledge structures and

become a factor of influence in assessments, judgments, and decisions we

make.

• Attribute substitution occurs when a person has to make a judgment (of

an attribute target) that is very complex. As a result of the complexity, the

mind substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic attribute to simplify

complexity.273

• Misconceptions are false, flawed or mistaken views, opinions or

attitudes and are likely to occur when knowledge about a specific area is

inadequate and supports only partial understanding. Therefore

generalizations are utilized to develop understanding of a situation or event.

• Fallacies are inconsistent arguments with weak premises that appear to

support a conclusion.

• Abstract inferences are abstractions or generalizations that simplify

concepts so the mind can cope with the concepts.

In the extreme these cognitive traps can lead to psychosis and neurotic

behavior. Existing psychotic conditions can also lead to the excessive use of

defense mechanisms.

However cognitive traps can also assist our thinking in making quick

categorizations of our perceptions to cut down on cognitive processing.

Inferences based upon flawed logic can also lead to great insights about

novel ideas leading to entrepreneurial opportunities. For example the

inference ‘buses are cheap and easy to catch’ may lead to a conclusion that

‘airlines should operate like bus companies’. This may have little actual

logic but may be insightful enough to form the basis of a new opportunity,

i.e., low cost airlines. Effectuation through inference is not a logical

process, and as we see in the example above it is not always logic that

produces useful insights.

Adults rarely test the boundaries of their realities and tend to stay within

the familiarity of the status quo. As children we had the ability to use

fantasy to escape reality and create new comfortable realities that we like to

dwell within, but we tend to lose this ability as we become adults. We tend

to utilize our imagination for destructive purposes like creating reasons

‘why something should not be done’ rather than ‘why not’ – building a sense

of risk aversion within us. People have a tendency to brood over issues for

long periods of time and become depressed over them.274

We are embedded within our culture which has a great influence on our

ability to think creatively. Cultures differ greatly in the pressures exerted for

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conformity and openness to new and novel ideas. We live within the

expectations of our society and can only openly imagine within the limits

that society imposes. In many societies this may be very limited, even post

industrial societies have become so rigid in the pressure for compliance to

regulation. The compliance society becomes very uncreative. In addition

peoples’ aspirations are changing. In past generations children aspired to be

firemen, airline pilots, and astronauts, but now they want to be reality TV

stars with little interest in originality, just being seen in places where there

are people. The role models of our time are people who can’t act, play an

instrument, sing, dance, do any sport, or have any intellectual talents.275

Our education systems are becoming rigid again after the forays into

experimental learning during the 1980s and 1990s. Brian Quinn coined the

term McDonaldization of the education system in describing how facilities

like libraries are designed and equipped to handle customers like a fast food

restaurant.276

Students are able to quickly obtain a repertoire of material

they require from a standardized curriculum, and find the answers all at the

end of the book. This has brought mass production and predictability into

education, where poor teaching is being blamed on declining academic

standards in Australian schools.277

Education is fast becoming a quantitative

experience where we are yet to know the costs on creativity and original

thinking.

Technology looks as though it is emancipating our lives. However

George Ritzer paints a much more sinister picture of technology and

postulates that it is the means of controlling and ‘putting people altogether’

in society.278

Although the internet and in particular social media has

opened up channels of communication between people, it is yet to be seen

what effects it has on creativity. Social networking, news, films,

pornography, games, and other information available on the internet has

become a major distraction.279

We communicate, but what is the quality of

what we are communicating? Instead of social media becoming the great

collective consciousness, it has become a collective garbage dump. People

meet physically but are predisposed with others, texting on their mobile

phones. Many are consumed with internet games developing ‘avatars’

creating relationships with others through their ‘cyber alter egos’. Action

video games were thought to assist in enhancing skills that many consider

important in contemporary society.280

However recent research disputes

this, claiming flaws in previous studies ascribing that playing video games

enhances cognitive development.281

Video game research is still in its

infancy with no clear cut results on the positive and negative effects of

playing such games.282

Maybe technology has done more than capitalism to

create Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.283

The domains that we have been trained within, identify with, and

practice within most often lock us into bounded and channeled thinking. We

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see things from the perspectives of our domain and become locked into the

old ‘game theory’ paradigm that converts to failure overtime.284

In science

and engineering journals this can be clearly seen in the structure of

academic journal formats and editorial control. Cliquey academics are

defensive against outsiders which keep disciplines restricted to certain

ideas, not readily open to accepting new ideas.285

If we look at various domains we see almost innovative stagnation.

Automobiles remain much the same today as they did twenty years ago

except for accessories, ancillaries, and styling. The long range airline

industry still uses the Boeing 747 as the major workhouse that was

developed during the 1960s. The traditional sources of power generation

coal, gas, and hydro are still the major contributors of power today, without

any clear cut new technologies on the horizon. New developments within

the pharmaceutical industry are restricted by the demands of regulation

requiring exhaustive trials and dossiers on any new product. Even the

mobile phone industry is advancing by style rather than breakthroughs in

technology of late. Most advances within the industries mentioned above

have come from outside, i.e., software, new composite materials, avionics

and electronics, etc. It appears we have been living on the breakthroughs of

the past, even though we have great advances in knowledge.286

Much of our

economic growth over the last 30 years has been through technology

replication. The creative insights of the past have become the rigidities of

today.

Most new development work is undertaken within tightly budgeted

product development processes that leave little room for speculative

development. In addition, many product enhancements seem to be

undertaken for the sake of making enhancements for consumer problems

that don’t readily exist, like new browsers, viewers and applications, etc.

Most creativity comes from dissenting people who are willing to work with

frustration and unpredictability.

16. Conclusion

Howard Gardner’s study of Freud and his contemporaries in his book

Creative Minds pointed to the importance of prior knowledge, high

curiosity, and intellectual strength based upon selective forms of

intelligence rather than specific thinking styles, i.e., Freud intrapersonal,

Einstein spatial and mathematical, Picasso spatial and visual, Stravinsky

musical, Eliot language, and Graham kinesthetic intelligence.

Csikszentmihalyi emphasized the field, domain, peers, and whether new

ideas gained social acceptance about what is original. Thus all original

thinking is bound to our knowledge, culture, and society of which we

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cannot escape, thus putting a limit on how far any original thinking can

move away from what is accepted as the current reality. Breakthroughs like

Copernicus’s pronouncement that the Earth and planets rotated around the

Sun287

rather than the Sun and planets rotating around the Earth required

peer and society acceptance to become the new reality. Charles Darwin’s

theory of natural selection, although not actually discussing the evolution of

man, was seen for a number of years as a theological challenge to the very

notion that man was a divine species as Christian doctrine proclaimed. Thus

Darwin was seen by some in the establishment as a threat to the power of

the church rather than advancing our understanding of how species evolved.

To escape the influence of the field and domain, one must have the ability

to withdraw from it, to escape the influence of current themes of

knowledge. This means ignoring the influence of others and putting in the

effort to think of original ideas. This takes a great energy and discipline

which is truly not appreciated. Peter Drucker’s sources of innovation in his

seminal book Innovation and Entrepreneurship published in 1984 is

certainly influenced by Schumpeter’s sources of innovative opportunity

published in 1934.288

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s 2005 work

Blue Ocean Strategy may have taken some inspiration from Michael

Porter’s ideas on segmentation and competitive advantage back in 1985.289

One is anchored to the ideas of the domain where creativity can only

manifest through extension in most cases.

Many people promoted to the position of professor at a university

engage in activities with very heavy time commitments such as travel,

appearances, meetings, conferences, preparing tedious semesterial reports,

and other obligations leaving very little time for thinking. Due to pressure to

meet key performance index (KPI), many professors tend to engage in

superficial research that may be very situational and provide little real

contribution to the domain. The top echelons of the academic hierarchy

become an anti-intellectual environment.290

Complacency exists where

positions become rewards for work previously done. In contrast both Freud

and Einstein were both isolated during their creative periods, something not

many people are willing to do.

In learning, humankind has performed very poorly as a species. We

have not learned the lessons of war, continually repeating our destructive

nature. Even the lessons from Vietnam were not learned with the invasion

of Iraq some 40 years later.291

The disgust of the holocaust of World War

Two has not prevented similar mass extermination of people in Africa,

Asia, Central Asia, and the Balkans over the last 70 years. The shock of the

2004 tsunami didn’t last long as most coastal early warning equipment in

South-east Asia is not in working condition today and people keep building

by the coast just waiting for another disaster to happen. The contrast

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between Haiti and the Dominican Republic shows that ‘human’ intervention

has great impact upon the environment.292

In education, emphasis should be put on creative thinking rather than an

orientation towards general intelligence as represented by Bloom’s

taxonomy. This was happening in higher education institutions in post

industrial societies, but there is now an emphasis on the quantitative due to

the rapid increase in the international education market. But higher

education within the developing world is still to a large degree based on

repetitive learning rather than creativity based curricula. The skills required

for original thinking are not being disseminated. General arts and science

degrees that provided grounding across a number of arts and science

disciplines were once popular but have been disappearing in favor of

domain specialization based degrees. A return to these general degrees will

introduce people to a wide array of disciplines that may encourage

interdisciplinary thinking.

Creativity and original thinking are most likely to occur where the

environment metaphorically collides, where paradoxes co-exist, where

incongruities develop, where new technology is more efficient than older

technology, and where better ways of doing things can be discovered. New

technologies collide with an industry bringing new possibilities as we have

seen with the advent of mobile phones that are making landline networks

almost extinct, the internet, debit cards replacing cash transactions, and new

medical technologies enabling local clinics to perform a much wider range

of medical procedures, etc. The domains of biotechnology, medicine,

agriculture, nano-electronics, communications, computing, and imaging are

some of the areas where there are likely to be breakthroughs due to merging

disciplines. Those people who are able to look at things from multiple

disciplines and perspectives, and synthesize their knowledge in developing

responses to problems are the ones that will be most likely to achieve

breakthroughs. So the age of the individual inventor may decline in favor of

highly skilled trans-disciplinary teams. However, it almost goes without

saying that there will always be a place for individuals who are able to see

things that others can’t see like the recent discovery of a new planet by

Chris Holmes and Lee Threapleton.293

In this world of convergence where products and industries are merging

with each other, trans-disciplinary knowledge and skills are required. Being

a domain specific engineer will not be good enough. In order to be creative

the engineer must have knowledge across a number of disciplines that can

be synergized into some meaningful expressions in the form of new

inventions and product applications. This synergization may come from an

insight into some issues facing society to be solved, as shown in figure 8.

Trans-disciplinary approaches increase the scope of knowledge, where new

knowledge can evolve from a greater base, and although creativity may be

70

an individual phenomenon, innovation is more likely a collaborative

emergence under the trans-disciplinary paradigm.

Any opportunity, invention, or innovation is bound to the past, present,

and the field. To the past because any idea is bound to previous ideas and

inventions. To the present because the idea or invention must solve today’s

problems, human needs, or aspirations. New ideas or products must fit into

society’s institutions, industry supply chains, and trade channels. The

tolerance of our society puts limits upon the possible, and anything beyond

these tolerance levels will be doomed to failure. The difference between

Jules Verne’s fantasy of man landing on the moon and the Apollo 11 moon

landing is not vision, but available knowledge and technology, and a sense

of national will and endeavor to achieve the goal.

Our Current knowledge

Trans-Disciplinary

Synergy of Knowledge

“Issues facing society to be solved”

Other disciplines of

knowledge

Microbiology

Biology

Chemistry

Agriculture

Biochemistry

Physics

Engineering

“Deep

Insight”

Application or

Invention

Insight Expressed

New forms of

Expression

Figure 8. Trans-disciplinary knowledge in the green biotechnology field and the

expression of new knowledge as a new invention or product application.

Most breakthroughs today are being made by moving into new domains.

And it is not necessarily a requirement to be an expert within all technical

aspects of a new domain to succeed. It may be sufficient to share some

common skills like marketing to be able to leverage entry. Thus an in-depth

knowledge of aircraft and the airline industry wasn’t as critical to success as

knowledge of a working business model for the birth of Virgin or Air Asia.

Industries will continue to be disrupted by young ‘upstarts’ like Steve Jobs

and Steve Wozniak who developed and launched the Apple computer in

1976 outpacing the giant IBM in the new emerging personal computer

market. Time and time again, seeing opportunities and knowing how to

promote an idea enables many entrepreneurs to enter new domains and

quickly dominate them, while existing industry leaders are unaware of the

opportunity and/or complacent.

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One of the emerging themes of the early part of this century has been the

emulation and mimicking of nature.294

Scientists are leaning towards the

concepts of nature as inspiration in developing new materials like self-

repairing polymers, photosynthesis in the production of energy, non-

Newtonian fluids for engineering applications, and artificial intelligence.

Darwin’s concepts of natural selection and evolution are now finding a

place within contemporary management theory.295

In the real world, life

must await the right conditions and moment before it can exist as what it is

meant to be. For example, plants adapt their structure and internal processes

to available space, nutrients, changes in climate, and seasons. Our world is

biological rather than mechanical.

Many philosophical ideas are not really original but are presented in

new and powerful ways that render them persuasive ideas at the time. On

the marketing front, Blue Ocean Strategy may be one such manifestation

where the authors and promoters showed the relevance of the ideas to

today’s society. Thomas Edison is generally believed by many to be the

inventor of the electric light bulb. Edison spent an enormous amount of his

time promoting himself and his ideas. As we have seen from biographies of

the great inventor/entrepreneurs of the 19th century, self promotion was a

major factor in gaining recognition.296

Science and rationality enables us to move foward, but it’s our

imagination and ethical standpoint that decides where that place will be.

Our destination changes not because our fundamental ethics change but the

way in how we apply them and imagine what could be. As Charles Darwin

found with his coral reef, mass attracts innovation and is the development of

large population centers where people congregate, contemplate, incubate,

and disseminate new ideas where creativity will grow.

The emergence of mega-cities with extremely high population density

increases the flow of useful ideas because of the concentration of people,

talent, communications, capital, latent entrepreneurial opportunity, and

trading relations.297

However all these conditions will not produce

innovation unless creativity is allowed to flourish. Creativity and original

thinking is most likely to occur in diverse and dynamic environments where

differences are celebrated rather than suppressed.

It is innovation and creative ingenuity that will be required to solve the

problems of this millennium. In paraphrasing what Howard Frederick said

about the paradigm of sustainable entrepreneurship as if the earth mattered;

it was an entrepreneur who caused the crisis (Henry Ford) and it will be an

entrepreneur (perhaps the one who commercializes hydrogen cars) who

may help fix the crisis,298

emphasizes that the solutions to our problems will

come from creativity and innovation.

We cannot assume all areas within countries are growing as statistics

would indicate. Parts of Africa, Asia, the Dominican Republic, and rural

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Australia are declining in prosperity, mainly at the expense of urbanization

where easy solutions are not available. In each case we lack prior

knowledge and experience to make wise decisions. What happens in one

part of the world will affect the rest of the world as we are seeing in the

Arab Spring, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We will see the globalization of the

world’s problems more and more in the future. Emigration will be more

pronounced putting stress upon many countries. Single decisions within the

business arena can shape destinies as well. The decision of IBM to use an

‘off the shelf’ operating system for their personal computer enabled Bill

Gates to envision a near monopoly on PC operating systems around the

world for more than 30 years.

Some of the urgent solutions required include;

• Finding new economic models that can provide stability and

employment once again to developed and post industrial economies,

• Redefine the structure of the banking system so it is controlled and

fulfills its monetary and social role in society,

• Find suitable ways to create energy and sustainable economic activities

that conserve resources for future generations,

• Reconcile and solve water, ozone layer, food, and agriculture issues,

• Learn how to redistribute the World’s wealth where there is growth in

some places, redistributed sources of growth in other regions to solve issues

like poverty and over population,

• Solve the problems of declining utilities infrastructure in mega-cities,

• Find a new base to the currency system and a way to return to country

monetary flexibility that mega-currencies (Euro) inhibited, and

• Solve migration and security problems.

Solutions must be co-created with the environment in mind. Most of our

problems have been created by our intervention within the environment. It

is the nature of the environment paradox that must be solved, i.e., the very

nature of competition itself is the basic force that prevents companies

surviving. The highly successful strategies of today might be the losers of

tomorrow as successful strategies will be brought down by competitors.299

Solutions require entrainment where things tend to become synchronized in

unison, where compatibility develops.300

For example for brands to be

successful, products must be entrained with consumers’ sets of positive

emotions to be successful.301

Co-evolution is based on the premise that we

cannot control the environment and the environment changes without our

intervention anyway. That is why each time the world faces a financial

crisis, there are different underlying causes and new solutions have to be

learned each time.302

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We don’t evolve through planning and foresight, but rather through ad

hoc decisions that accumulate. Evolutionary change occurs more out of

changing conditions rather than planning. For example, slavery ended not so

much out of a desire for equity and fairness of man but because coal and

steam power became more efficient than owning groups of slaves. It was

not the free market mechanism that developed US industry; it was state

capitalism and the opportunity of US industry to fill the void of world

markets after most of Europe was devastated after the Second World War.

The US had the advantage of economies of scale for many years, until rivals

like Japan could reemerge.303

Understanding is a static, knowing is what provides wisdom, where

cognitive connections develop intuition levels so that new realities can be

envisioned. One must contemplate that for every action there are

consequences. Even Peters and Waterman couldn’t provide us with the

correct formula for action that would lead to success. In fact there are many

successful businesses like restaurants that we don’t know what the factors

of success really are.

Most of us can’t see impending disasters coming just like a fish that

can’t see the water they are swimming within. To be able to see requires

willingness to let go of the assumption we have all the solutions to

everything, the fear of not knowing, our delusion of control, a realization

that our institutions are failing us, our reliance on false models, the dumping

of our beliefs in efficiency of markets, acceptance of the decline of

economic growth due to diminishing returns, and letting go of our past

habits and fascinations, e.g., home ownership. The logic of many disciplines

are changing. For example, world economic evolution is creating new

winners and new losers where the concepts of specialization cannot be

applied as in previous decades. Assumptions about labor and capital need to

change to reflect new realities where the factors of production and means of

capital accumulation are continually shifting. Development must be

distinguished from growth. There are no absolute solutions, as solutions

need to be refined, tested and refined again before they might be effective,

which is contrary to the quick fixes society expects.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Wells, H.G. (1946), The Mind at the End of its Tether. New York: Didier, 34.

2. See “The Creativity Crisis,” July 10th 2010, from Newsweek, The Daily

Beast,http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

3. Heinberg, R., (2011), The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic

Order. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2.

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4. Ritzer, G. (1993), The McDonaldization of Society: An investigation into the

changing character of contemporary social life, Thousand Oaks, CA, Pine Forge

press.

5. Nemeth, C., J., (1995), Dissent as Driving Cognition, Attitudes, and

Judgments, Social Cognition, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 273-291.

6. See Marcuse, H. (1991), One-Dimensional Man: studies in ideology of

advanced industrial society, London, Routledge, and McGilchrist, I., (2010), The

Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,

London, Yale University Press.

7. Ehrenreich, B., (2009), Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining

America, New York, Picador.

8. Michalko, M. (2011), ‘Why experts create few new ideas, Psychology Today,

October 26th, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creative-

thinkering/201110/why-experts-create-few-new-ideas

9. Lovelock, J. (2005), Gaia: Medicine for an ailing planet, London, Gaia

Books, P. 15.

10. Sachs, J., (2005), The End of poverty: How we can make it happen in our

lifetime, London, Penguin, pp. 2-3.

11. Most models only utilize a couple of variables to examine cause and effect.

For example Weber’s models were concerned with power, Lakoff’s models were

concerned with the social generation of truth, and Porter’s models with external

structural forces, where on the other hand Mintzberg ignores the role of structural

constraints upon management. These models correlated with certain actions or

behaviors in retrospect, but could not predict accurately in future scenarios.

12. Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon University believes that creativity in

organizations and society depends upon the outcomes of technology, talent, and

tolerance. Each is necessary but insufficient on its own. Florida sees an economic

geography canvass of creativity where the above conditions differ from place to

place. See Florida, R. (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class: And how its

transforming work, leisure, and community of everyday life, New York, Basic

books.

13. Connelly, C. (2012), Time keepers to introduce leap second June 30 to keep

in synch with mother earth, HeraldSun.com, January 6th,

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/technology/time-keepers-to-introduce-leap-second-

june-30-to-keep-in-sync-with-mother-earth/story-fn7celvh-1226238221924

14. Poor resource management in Australia has resulted in higher salinity levels

where land is now very unproductive. Larger land areas in Australia are needed to

get the same yields as other parts of the world. As a consequence Australian

agriculture needs higher input levels of fertilizers and fuel, where production costs

are higher. Uncompetitive industries include the citrus industry, where orange juice

is cheaper from Brazil, the frozen vegetable industry, where imports are cheaper

from China, and the eucalyptus industry, where imports are cheaper from other parts

of the world. Much of Australia’s land is now low marginal pastoral land. Jared

Diamond suggests that Australia’s import culture set the country’s destiny for failure

as sheep farming was not really suitable on the continent and questions why

kangaroo wasn’t developed as an industry. Australia faces a declining ability to

support its population with food and water, with more desalination plants needed in

75

the future. See: Diamond, J. (2006), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or

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aggregate utility would refer to the total satisfaction world consumers would gain

from consumption. Thus the economic aim in this case is to maximize utility for all

on Earth as a means to eliminate poverty.

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23. Original thinking is not limited by the style of thinking. It may involve

analytical, interpretive, contemplative, inductive, intuitive, deductive, creative, and

elaborative thinking styles. Relying upon one’s instincts or gut feelings (intuition)

can be more progressive than relying on grounded logic and rational reasoning.

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33. The ebb and flow of the possible is the set of opportunities that are created

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governed by intertwined social, economic, regulatory, and technological factors.

Opportunities are seen, discovered or constructed by individuals within these

environments. See Hunter, M. (2012), Opportunity, Strategy, & Entrepreneurship: A

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35. We define the size of the grey inner circles through relativity, i.e., we are

influenced by what is surrounding the object. So in this example the two grey circles

appear to be different sizes because of their respective relative positions to the

circles of different sizes. This also gives context as all meanings are contextual,

which can lead to different outlooks, i.e., a big fish in a small ocean and a small fish

in a large ocean will need to adopt different survival habits based on their relative

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42. “In its first 18 months, the MVP’s five main objectives were to: (i) Provide

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universal access to functioning health clinics; (iv) Increase primary school

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and leadership; and on infrastructure for transport, energy, and information and

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110. Hunter, M. (2012), op. cit., 352.

111. Darwin began keeping notes on the phenomena of evolution on his early

voyages in the 1830s and made a sketch of his book The Origin of Species in the

early 1840s. However he expanded and almost completely rewrote it after another

decade and a half of further observations, finally publishing the book in 1859. See

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115. Gardner, H. (1993), Creating Minds. New York: Basic Books, 52.

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122. Hunter, M. (2012), op. cit., 341.

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125. Quirin, M., Kazen, M., & Kuhl, J., (2009), “When Nonsense Sounds Happy

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129. Root-Bernstein, R. S., & Root-Bernstein, M. M., (2001). Sparks of Genius:

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130. Many people mistake their aspirations for opportunity. For example people

put their money and effort into a boutique, restaurant, or spa for the wrong reasons

because they like fashion, shopping, food and cooking, or aromatherapy and

massage, only to close down a few months later because there was no real

opportunity.

131. However a future orientation in imagination may be the actual position that

a science fiction writer may cherish.

132. Domicile outlook can be defined as the beliefs, attitudes and views one

develops from the position they live and social status. The concept brings together

factors like social status, income, location, state of employment and immigrant

status. Together these factors contribute to a person’s basic beliefs, attitudes and

outlook towards opportunity and their potential to exploit it.

133. Zimbardo, 7; Boyd, J. (2009), The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of

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134. Andreski, S. (ed.) (1983), Max Weber on Capitalism, Bureaucracy, and

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135. This is an area that will probably be given much more attention in the near

future, particularly in the discipline of entrepreneurship.

136. Lykken, D. T. (2005), “Mental Energy,” Intelligence 33(4): 321-335;

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137. Emotional energy could be a primal defense against danger. For example

something strange has been seen or heard in the distance and the mind has an

opportunity to consider the response to the potential sign of danger. There is a

normal reflexive response to freeze and then consider what to do next. The response

will be emotional rather than reasoned, as emotions are much quicker to generate

than thoughts and reasoning.

138. For a superb account of how our cognitive, emotional and physical systems

function see chapter 5 of Michael A. Jawer, and Marc S. Micozzi, (2009), The

Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion: How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth

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139. There are many definitions and descriptions of the concept of Qi. Qi is a

concept describing our life-process, our bodily flow of energy that sustains our life.

According to the principals of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Qi circulates

83

around our body where metaphorically it could be viewed as a biological plasma

that maintains our general functioning and health. However like emotional and

mental energy Qi cannot be detected through any form of scientific instrumentation.

140. A mood is a long lasting emotional state that is less intense that the

emotions they are based on. Unlike emotions, moods are not necessarily triggered by

crisis events. A mood will usually have a positive or negative feeling orientation,

such as a good or bad mood.

141. Rather than look at a situation and run through a series of potential options

to find the optimum action, we tend to judge everyday things based on our emotions.

142. Psychotic disorders are actually emotional disorders that arise through

situational and social conflict dealing with issues of anxiety, low self esteem,

feelings of hopelessness, resentment or persecution, etc.

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146. The traditional measure of intelligence was the IQ test to predict school

performance and vocational potential.

147. This can be seen in tests which measured more than a single variable like

the Scholastic Aptitude test (SAT), which gives a verbal and mathematic score.

Another test, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children gives 11 subtest scores of

which 6 are concerned with verbal abilities and 5 with non-verbal abilities.

148. Gardner, H. (2003), “Multiple Intelligence after Twenty Years,” paper

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April.

149. Gardner, H. (2004), op. cit., 60-61.

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154. Whiten, A., & Byrne, R. (1997), Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions

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155. Byrne, R. (1997), “Machiavellian Intelligence,” Evolutionary Anthropology

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156. Kirton, M. J. (1994), “Five Years On,” Preface to the second edition, in

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157. Homer-Dixon, T. (2000), op. cit., 395.

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158. For example many notable thinkers and entrepreneurs that dropped out of

school or were self taught include Abraham Lincoln, Amadeo Peter Giannini,

Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Jackson, Barry Diller, Ben Kaufman, Benjamin Franklin,

Carl Linder, Charles Culpeper, Christopher Columbus, Coco Chanel, Colonel

Harlen Sanders, Dave Thomas, David Geffen, Dave Karp, David Ogilvy, DeWitt

Wallace, Frederick Laker, Frederick hennery Royce, George Eastman, Ingar

Kamprad, Isaac Merrit Singer, Jay Van Andel, Jerry yang, John D. Rockefeller,

Joyce C. hall, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Ray Kroc, Richard Branson, Shawn

Fanning, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Edison, and Walt Disney.

159. Gardner, H. (2004), Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligence

(Twentieth Anniversary Edition). New York: Basic Books, 4.

160. Alloway, T. P. (2009), “Working Memory, but not IQ, Predicts Subsequent

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161. Hicks, M. J. (2004), Problem Solving and Decision Making: Hard, Soft and

Creative Approaches. London: Thomson Learning, 337.

162. Sternberg, R. J. (2002), “Successful Intelligence: A New Approach to

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163. Tacit knowledge is generally acquired on one’s own, usually unspoken and

implicit, procedural in natural, not readily articulated and directly related to practical

goals that people value (Sternberg, ibid., 11).

164. Cropley, A. J. (1994), “Creative Intelligence: A Concept of True

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165. Khandwalla, P. N. (2004), Lifelong Creativity: An Unending Quest. New

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166. Rowe, A. J. (2004), op. cit.

167. Rowe, A. J. (2004), ibid., 3.

168. Khandwalla, P. N. (2004), op. cit., 213.

169. Singer, W. (2009), ibid., 326.

170. An example of how assembly coding enables the identification of novel

objects through flexible recombination can be understood by seeing how a small

child may identify a cow for the first time, if they have no previous experience or

understanding of what a cow is. The child upon seeing the cow at the zoo identifies

the cow (a novel object) as a large version of the dog, he or she has at home. It is

only after the parents explain that a cow is a different animal to a dog, that the child

can refine his or her identification of the cow as a separate animal to a dog. Reading

is another activity that shows how the brain can understand the recombination of

letters making up different words, sentences and paragraphs into unique meaning.

171. Singer, W. (2009), “The Brain, a Complex Self-Organizing System,”

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172. Singer, W. (2009), ibid., 325.

173. Many creative enhancement tools exist which include Brainstorming,

attribute listing, absurd solutions, analogies, checklists, excursions, morphological

analysis, Synectics, and thinking frames, etc.

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174. Hicks, M. J. (2004), op. cit., 45.

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177. Hunter, M. (2011), op. cit.

178. Hunter, M. (2011), op. cit., 102-112.

179. Mindfulness is a state of open acceptance of one’s own perceptions and

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182. Different schools of thought have tried to answer questions like “why do

some people see opportunities and other people don’t?’ These have included

personality traits, propensity to take risk, entrepreneurial intentions, behavioural and

cognitive approaches.

183. Hunter, M. (2012), op. cit., 322-325.

184. Creative sensitivity is the empathetic relationship between ourselves and

the environment and our ability to perceive and understand complex situations we

observe and are involved in. High creative sensitivity implies that we are observant

and aware of the things around us and feel comfortable with the complexity within

the environment. To find out what aspect your sensitivity exists, think about what

issues your find repulsive, irritating and distressful.

185. For example, a person may be spiritually sensitive and as a consequence

become devoted to a particular religion or philosophy. One will have changing

levels of commitment to their spirituality as life progresses and certain events

happen.

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(1993), “Broadening the Definition of Decision Making: The Role of Prochoice

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191. Mitchell et al. (2000) define a number of scripts that influence individual’s

reasoning. Those relevant to opportunity include arrangement scripts that are

knowledge structures about the specific arrangements that that support performance

and expert level mastery within an organization, willingness scripts that are

knowledge structures that underlie commitment to new venture creation, and ability

scripts that contain knowledge about a person’s skills, competencies, norms, and

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192. Dominant logic is a term that was first used in the field of strategic

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was to be called mental maps by peter Senge almost a decade later. The author

describes the dominant logic as a person’s worldview which manifests into a

person’s underlying assumptions, beliefs, values, and desires. The dominant logic

also carries a person’s likes, dislikes interests and aspirations, thus influencing

cognitive attention, focus and concentration. The dominant logic evolves out of a

person’s experiences, knowledge, and long term emotional orientations, forming a

major part of identity. Therefore dominant logic governs what a person perceives,

thinks about, and how they behave. Dominant logic is socially and culturally

embedded, linking the person to the outside environment, and operates sub-

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234. Lovelock, J. (2005), op. cit., 6.

235. This was championed by the then US President Ronald Reagan and then

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a solution to economic inefficiencies at

the time, although it was based on the philosophies of neo-liberalism coined as

“Reaganism” and “Thatcherism”.

89

236. One case of point is the sell-off of the British Railway system into smaller

packages which made planning, coordination, and safety very difficult.

237. The global banking crisis of 2008 which started in US mortgage defaults

can be partly attributed to a deregulated market that cannot correct itself due to the

absence of checks and balances.

238. For example Microsoft faced a number of antitrust lawsuits pursuant to the

Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 over a number of issues relating to the abuse of

monopoly power on Intel chip based personal computers, operating system and web

browser sales in the late 1990s. Although it lost many of these cases, Microsoft was

still able to cement a near monopoly position in the marketplace.

239. The big government of the 1950’s was partly the result of the Second

World War and Keynesian philosophy of fiscal control to manage the economy.

240. Bajrektarevic, A., (2012), “Why Kyoto Will Fail Again (On the Day after

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241. The cultivation of bio-fuels was partly blamed for the food crisis in 2007

and charging hybrid electric cars still require electricity that is on the whole

produced through traditional energy generation means like coal that produce

greenhouse gases anyway

242. Lovelock, J. (2005), op. cit., 9.

243. Rosenthal, E. (2011), “Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and

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245. Kelley, D. J., Singer, S. M., & Herrington, M. D. (2012), The Global

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252. See Gina Neff Blogspot http://ginaneff.blogspot.com/

253. Hunter, M. (2011), op. cit., 122.

254. Anderson, S., W., Bechhara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A.

R. (1999), “Impairment of Social and Moral Behavior Related to Early Damage in

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255. These qualities that Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel postulate are

characteristics of what they call our moral intelligence. See Lennick, D., & Kiel, F.

(2008), Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance & Leadership

Success. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing.

256. Empathy probably plays a major role in our ethical morality through the

ability to feel what others feel and thereby experience the emotions of compassion

and humility. Research has shown that a neglected upbringing of a child may retard

growth of the cortical and sub-cortical areas of the brain important for connection to

others, our empathy. Perry, B. D., & Pollard, D. (1997), “Altered Brain

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257. This could be a metaphoric collective unconscious which is the sum of all

our social learning and genetic inheritance within our prior knowledge.

258. Anthropologist Donald Brown postulates that all cultures and societies have

common universals which include the ability to distinguish between right and

wrong. Kinnier et al. analyzed the tenants of moral codes across religions and came

up with a common list, and Peterson et al. identified six universal values common

across all cultures, wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and

transcendence. Brown, D. E. (1991), Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill;

Kinnier, R. T., Kernes, J. L., & Dautheribes, T. M., (2000), “A Short List of

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259. Goleman, D. (2009), Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Costs of What

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260. Diamond, J. (2006), op. cit.

261. This concept is well embedded in eastern philosophy and culture. Hindu,

Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh philosophies deeply behold the concept of karma. Although

the meaning of Karma differs between the philosophies, it describes the law of

causation. This is basically where one would experience the consequences of what

one does at some future time in this or after life. Karma thus returns the

consequences of what one does – a force of responsibility. Karma relates to both

91

good and bad deeds. The concept of Karma is embedded within many South-east

Asian societies. For example the Malay culture that has Hindu roots but practices

contemporary Islam has a deep belief within society that what one does towards

others will eventually come back to them. Therefore this belief is one of the ultimate

guiding morals for Malay society. See Asrul Zamani (2002), The Malay Ideals.

Kuala Lumpur: Golden Books.

262. Jablonka, E. & Lamb, M. J. (2000), Evolution in Four Dimensions:

Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life.

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263. See a report on research undertaken by Dr. David Lewis at the University

of Sussex’x Mindlab at http://healthmad.com/mental-health/doing-good-deeds-for-

other-could-improve-your-health/

264. See Crosby, P. (1984), Quality is Free: Quality without Tears. New York:

McGraw-Hill.

265. However the solution is often very complex because conditions may be

different, which prevented the successful adoption of Japanese automobile

manufacturing techniques in America.

266. Gharajedaghi, J. (2006), Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and

Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture, 2nd edition.

Amsterdam: Elsevier, 41-42.

267. Larsen, R. J. (2000), “Toward a Science of Mood Regulation,”

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268. Cramer, P. (2000), “Defense Mechanisms in Psychology Today: Further

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269. Csikszentimihaly, M. (1990), The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New

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270. Janis, I.L. (1972), Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign

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271. Kotter, J. (2008), A Sense of Urgency. Boston, MA: Harvard Business

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272. Bardwick. J. M. (1995), Danger in the Comfort Zone: From the Boardroom

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273. Kahneman, D. and Frederick, S. (2002), “Representativeness Revisited:

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274. Teasdale, J. D. (1983), “Negative Thinking in Depression: Cause, Effect, or

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275. See “The Reality of the Celebrity Money Machine,” BBC News Magazine,

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277. Tatnell, P. (2012), “More Dollars but Less Sense Training our Teachers and

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278. Ritzer, G. (1993), The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into

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279. The internet may have cut down our reading time and distracted us but now

we have a much greater ability to connect with others much quicker than previously

in so many ways. This may enable us to combine hunches much quicker than

previously and take advantage of the synergy of more than one person thinking

about something. The internet also enables us to stumble across new pieces of

information we previous were unaware of.

280. Green, S. C., Pouget, A., & Bavelier, D. (2010), “Improved Probabilistic

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281. Maclin, E., Mathewson, K., Low, K. A., Boot, W. R., Fabiani, M., Gratton,

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282. Bavelier, D., Green, S. C., Han, D. H., Renshaw, P. F., Merzenich, M. M.,

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283. Marcuse, H. (1991), op. cit.

284. Firms can also change the way the game is played within their competitive

fields. Alfred Sloan’s divisionalization assisted the way corporate America grew.

Taiichi Ohno, the chief engineer at Toyota developed lean manufacturing system

which enabled the changing of a machine dye in 3 minutes compared to 3 days in

the US, changing the way automobiles were manufactured. When a firm is unwilling

to follow the changes in game rules, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant. Fletcher

Jones wanted to restrict production to Australia of his suits and have employees own

the company when his competitors were all producing in China. Fletcher Jones went

bankrupt.

285. However as a counter trend, more people are publishing than ever before.

There is an exponential jump in the number of people publishing new ideas, a

massive jump in the number of journals, and many more new business ideas and

theories. While the author was at university during the 1970s there were a limited

number of familiar business and management journals. The acceptance of work into

a journal is so much easier now than before (some of this is checkbook academia),

however so much of these works never get read by those who are opinion leaders.

286. Harford, T. (2011), Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

London: Little Brown, 94.

287. Interesting is that Aristarchus seventeen centuries earlier described the solar

system where the Sun was at rest and the planets revolved around it in circular

orbits.

288. See Drucker, P.F. (1984), Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and

Principals. New York: Harper; and Schumpeter, J. (1934), Capitalism, Socialism,

and Democracy. New York: McGraw-Hill.

289. Chan Kim, W., and Mauborgne, R. (2005), Blue Ocean Strategy: How to

Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. Boston:

Harvard Business School Press, and Porter, M. E. (1985), Competitive Advantage:

93

Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York: Free Press, see Chapter

7.

290. See Clayton, M. (2003), “Deep Thinkers Missing in Action,” Christian

Science Monitor, January, 21st, http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0121/p17s02-

lehl.html, Michael Markow, “Anti-intellectualism in Schools and Universities,”

http://www.viewshound.com/politics/2011/6/25/anti-intellectualism-in-schools-and-

universities

291. However this is my value judgment as attitudes and values change over

time history may look very differently upon the Iraq saga.

292. Diamond, J. (2006), op. cit., 339.

293. See U.K. Amateur astronomers find new planet, UPI.Com,

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/01/20/UK-amateur-astronomers-find-new-

planet/UPI-78541327104776/

294. Benyus, J. M. (2002), Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New

York: HarperPerennial.

295. Hardford, T. (2011), op. cit.

296. Schweikart, L., & Doti, L. P. (2010), American Entrepreneur: Fascinating

Stories of the People who Defined Business in the United States. New York:

AMACOM.

297. Homer-Dixon, T. (2000), The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the

Problems of the Future? New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 26.

298. Frederick H. H., & Kuratko, D. F. (2010), Entrepreneurship: Theory,

Process, Practice, 2nd Asia-Pacific Edition. Melbourne: Cengage Learning, 3.

299. Beinhocker, E. D. (2006), The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity,

and the Radical Remaking of Economics. New York: Random House, 230-1.

300. In the 17th century the Dutch physicist Christian Huygens discovered that

his pendulum clocks were all ticking in unison within his laboratory. Knowing that

clocks could not be precise, Huygens hypothesized that the clocks were

synchronized through minute vibrations travelling throughout the building. This

phenomenon can be seen through planetary systems, electronics, the human body,

and even menstrual tensions within families.

301. Hill, D. (2010), Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success,

2nd edition. London: KoganPage, 49-50.

302. Norberg, J. (2009), Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with

Home Ownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis. Washington: Cato

Institute.

303. King, S. D. (2010), Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western

Prosperity. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, see chapter 2.